Who makes those wonderful signs?

I have a few shops in SL. As I get better, so does my detailing and just paying more attention to the little things. Now I see that the photos taken in SL and slapped on the side of my boxes or the hovering text just aren't good enough. I want nice packaging and signs, DARN IT!

I have Gimp. Is there a turtorial that can help me to does this myself?

Thanks for ANY advice

My sign is pretty flat and boring... It's pretty much just a collections of red, purple, black, and pink gradients and a free goth font I found on a download site. (=_=)

I think it's best to approach a sign board in SL knida like a banner on a web page, graphics wise. (^_^)

http://www.photoshopdesign.net/tutorials/psdnet30a.htm

^^ Something like that tutorial works for me for figuring out the best use for layers and details. The rest is concept... A subject where I'm sorely lacking. (T_T)

in your quest to make pretty signs, rember that simple and elegant can often look better (not to mention load faster) than complex and colorful...

All I want is a pic of the item as a background and the name of the item and price on the box. All I have now is the pic and hover text. *laughs because if she thinks about it more, she may cry*

a basic way of doing it would be to find a nice textured backdrop, stick it on a 10X10 prim, take a photo onto your hard drive of the prim with your item in front.

now go into Gimp, Ms paint, photoshop, whichever program you prefer, use the text tool to add some text (item name, price and permissions is the best idea), maybe chop some bits off around the edges of the picture if there is alot of dead space.

upload the picture to SL then slap it on your boxes with your item inside. simple but effective. should take you about 5-10 minutes and only cost you 10L for each item

i really need to practice what i preach too

-Crunch

EDIT: a prime example would be the photo in my signature. it's just a snapshot from inworld with some text on it

I actually spend quite a bit of time on my display signs...not as much as designing the clothing, but pretty darn close by the time I'm done. I personally do my own modelling and take my own photos. So, on the flip side of the spectrum, here's how I do it:

Equipment-wise, I use the following:
-- The N30 photo modeling studio, for the backgrounds, lighting, and pose stand
-- Custom backdrops I've loaded into the N30
-- Some extra lighting boxes I purchased on SLX, though N30 now also sell some at their shop
-- Additional modeling poses. I personally like Luth
-- Snagit for capturing photo screen shots (the SL camera functions are just too much of a pain to work with)
-- Photoshop to put together the displays

The process:
1. Set your lighting and your background on the N30, jump on the modeling stand, choose your pose, and rotate your stand til you're standing the way you want for the shoot.

2. Zoom your SL view in to the angle you want, getting as much as you want of your avatar in the photo, remembering that you're going to edit the photo afterward in photoshop.

3. Use Snagit or your screen capture program to get your snapshot and save it to disk

4. In photoshop, open your photo. Create a template for your clothing displays, with the name of the item, the price, the contents, etc, leaving space for any photo(s) you plan to use. (Often I get front, back and side views of my items, and sometimes closeups if there's a great deal of detailing)

5. Copy your photos/screenshot(s) into the template, resizing and placing as necessary.

6. RESIZE YOUR TEMPLATE TO MAX. 512X512. I can't stress this enough. I've run enough markets to see what 500 vendor display textures at 1024x1024 look like, and I swear you'll almost never need a display tile that large. You won't lose too much quality if you run Sharpen on the textures after you've resized.

7. Save your resized display template as a .tga and upload it into SL.

As you can see, it's somewhat process-intensive the way I do it, but over time it becomes just that...a repeatable process. And try to remember that, as in real life, your marketing is as important as your designs. No one is going to buy your item if they can't see it well or if the display is unattractive, and in most cases you're competing for the immediate attention of all the other vendors in that shopping mall you're in. Use your displays to draw your customers in and make them take a second look.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to do some reading about graphic design, composition, and typography. Colour theory wouldn't hurt, either.

Two things from me...
If you're making a sign for the outside of your shop, definitely do something to make an impact. If, on the other hand, you're doing pictures for your selling boxes, keep it simple and realistic. There's nothing worse than buying something that looks nothing like it's picture.

There is a step by step tutorial of how to use GIMP to add text to a picture. Go see, I think, Rental Directory in world. Look on the third floor balcony.

I have to agree with Butch about not modifying your photos to make them look better than the outfits -- that would be false marketing. And frankly why spend a lot of time modifying the photo to make the product look like something it's not, when you can put the time into the design itself to make it better? That said, you can still get very attractive and persuasive displays by putting effort into the snapshot process. For my displays, it's all part of the "look and feel" of my brand.

Okay - so I'm not as complex as some... I'm also a fairly a new merchant and I have a hard time with many of the more complex ways of doing things. Not to mention, if it gets to be too much work, where is the fun in it? But, even with my easy method, I really do like my signs and packages.

I like using CoolText.com to make new logos, myself. It's free, and you can download each logo you make to your harddrive (unlimited downloads!) and save it in .png format or any other you like. I tend to do my logos in a variety of background colors (including transparency), that way I can use them in Gimp or any other program to add the logo to pictures, etc.

And I do use pictures from in world for my boxes... just temporarily turn up your view preferences so that you get better image/background/lighting quality when you take them. If you save them to harddrive, you can take a bunch of shots from different angles and with different backgrounds, and choose the one(s) you like. You can either upload them to SL as they are, or you can add your logo through Gimp.

With my displays/boxes, I tend to go by the KISS method - Keep It Simple Stupid. This method gives me a very attractive box without much fuss:

I start by putting just my logo on all faces of a prim, and I turn on full bright on all sides. Then I select one side's texture and apply a picture of the product the box will contain. Finally, I select the opposite side's texture for any text I want to add (like how to use my rez boxes, etc). I really keep it simple with the text - I open up Paint, and I type into a text window with a clear, but attractive font, and I save it in a low-pixel format to upload. I want my packaging images to load fast, so I keep all of my images as low-pixel as I can without losing quality.

And I don't use hover-text much. My personal opinion is that when it gets overused, it gets ignored. I hate walking into a store and being bombarded with hover-text... its very busy and hard on the eye, and I think it distracts from the products you're actually trying to sell. I've seen countless stores where merchants arrange vending boxes in a really nice way for display, but the hovertext of one box crosses the other or blocks/is blocked by the imaging on another box. To me, it looks like a jumbled mess of Linden barf instead of an attractive display of a person's talents and products. I use hover text on my vendos (for item descriptions, etc), and I use it on my freebie boxes, and that's about it.

Hope this helps... from one technically challenged merchant to another!

Sincerely,
Moonshy Littlething
PrimShy Designs

My method:

Big box in a shade I've never (so far) used, full-bright so its an even tone.

Stand in the box, in a nice shape, wearing a nice skin & hair, and the clothes I want to model. Take a bunch of photos in different poses. (I've started making my own hairs for this, and I'm using the Eloh Eliot skins a lot these days.)
Oh: don't use a hair that has transparency, if you can avoid it.

Go into the Gimp. Pick a photo, give it an alpha channel (Layer-Transparency->Add alpha), select-by-colour the colour of the box, cut. This leaves just my av in the clothes, on a transparent background.

Select the av (in a rectangle select that's fairly close to the edges of the bit I want), and paste into my display image template. Scale and position her (or him) into a nice-looking position.


My display image template looks like this pretty ASCII-art:


*******************************************
* PRICE______________________PRODUCT NAME *
* __________________________supplemental info *
*__________________________________________*
* Package__________________________________*
* contains__________________________________*
* all this____________________________________*
* nifty stuff__________________________________*
* _________________________________________*
* _________________________________________*
LOGO__________________________________Copy *
GOES________________________________Modify *
HERE_____________________________No Transfer *
********************************************


Only it's square, and those horizontal lines are actually blank white space for pictures.

There's space on the right and at the bottom for any more things people might need to
know about the particular product, and there's plenty of room in the centre for nice clear product images.

Each segment is on its own layer. Permissions on one layer, package contents on another,
price on a third, title and supplemental on their own layers. Even the logo and border have their own layers, which came in handy when I decided to make a more 'masculine' border for male-specific clothing (rather than unisex stuff).

I use a white background, because for anything other than white clothing, white shows it well. (Alas, I just made a set which includes a white shirt - this should be interesting to model!)


This template also works well for OnRez and SLExchange sales: just de-visual the info stuff and maybe rearrange or rescale the product image to make it fill that now-empty space.



Edit to add: I'd like to reinforce what Rachel Darling said. 512 is MAXIMUM. You won't sell a damn thing out of a grey panel, and customers won't wait for all your lovely 1024s to rez.

Edit to add: To make a new text layer in the Gimp, select the text tool (big bold A), and on the Layers dialog, select a non-text layer, such as the background. Click in the image with your text tool, and it will ask if you want to make a new text layer.
Enter your text. The text layer will be somewhere awful, but that's okay. Go to the tools menu, and select the 'arrange' tool - the box with arrows pointing out of it. Click on whatever part of the text layer you can see, then use the align and distribute tools in the 'arrange' tool's options box to position the text layer. It takes some getting used to: 'align' will move to an absolute position, 'Distribute' lets you choose a numeric offset and then click the arrow buttons. Play with it for a while.

I use the 'arrange' tool for my text layers because, annoying as it is, once the text layer is positioned I can then change the text with the text tool without the Gimp #*$&^-ing clearing all my settings for the #@$97-ing layer.

A lot of great information and I had someone contact me in-world that is going to help me out until I can learn myself.