***Skylar's Guide To Gradients and Formatting

So, hey members of THGRPG! Cinder brought up making guides and I'd been wanting to make one for the longest time, so here I am, making one! This guide, if you haven't already figured it out, is a guide to text gradients. A text gradient, seen here, is where you make small clumps of letters different colors, but colors that are so similar that over time one color fades into another. In this case, the color it fades to fades back to the original, but this isn't always the case. You maybe have seen these around the site, and you might just not know what they were called or what they were, but this is where all of that ends! The other section to this guide is a guide to formatting posts, meaning adding blockquotes/centering/ to your posts to make them look the best they can be. Though this guide may be lengthy, it'll help ya', and I suggest you read it if you wish to make your posts pretty/better than they actually are.

Text Gradients Galore.

So, if you haven't guessed, this is the text gradients portion of the guide, and it's probably gonna be split up into two or more sections, depending on how it works out; one for manual text gradients, where you actually input each color code for each letter/word and do it that way, and the other section is doing it by photo editing software such as GIMP and Photoshop.

Manual Gradients.

To start off, this is the sentence/group of words we'll be using for our gradient:

So, this is an example of a manual text gradient.

You're gonna use this site for this gradient, and at the top, you're gonna insert the color CC99FF and press 'Submit', and then at the bottom, you're gonna insert FFDEAD and press 'Submit' there, too. You'll get a pretty looking gradient that looks like this. Now that's all we're gonna do at this point in time on that site.

So, this is an example of a manual text gradient.

See that up there? That's what my gradient looks like before it's actually a text gradient. What I did/what you should do, is count how many color codes there is in our gradient (21 in our case), and then count the number of characters (letters) in our group of words and make them somewhat equal. For this one, there's 38 letters and 21 color codes, so about one color code for every two letters or so; give or take a few every once in a while. So what I did, is highlight two letters, and click a random color from the color drop bar in the 'Add Tags:' section of the posting page. The result above is what I ended up with.

So what you're going to do now, is individually copy each hex code (color code) and slide it into each code, so we'd start off by taking the first one, CC99FF, copy everything but the # sign, and slip it into the code around the 'So,'. You're result should be: So,. Coded like [*color=CC99FF]So,[*/color] without the star (*). After we do this, we'll go on to the next color code, and insert it into the code around 'th' in the word 'this'. We'd repeat what we did the first time, just taking a different hex code each time, so it'd end up looking like this:

So, this is an example of a manual text gradient.


Use this code for your reference if you've been following along;
[color=CC99FF]So,[/color] [color=CF9CFB]th[/color][color=D1A0F7]is[/color] [color=D4A3F3]is[/color] [color=D6A7EF]an[/color] [color=D9AAEA]ex[/color][color=DBAEE6]am[/color][color=DEB1E2]pl[/color][color=E0B5DE]e[/color] [color=E3B8DA]of[/color] [color=E6BCD6]a[/color] [color=E8BFD2]ma[/color][color=EBC2CE]nu[/color][color=EDC6CA]al[/color] [color=F0C9C6]te[/color][color=F2CDC2]xt[/color] [color=F5D0BD]gr[/color][color=F7D4B9]ad[/color][color=FCDBB1]ie[/color][color=FFDEAD]nt.[/color]

You could then fancy it up by centering/changing the font and stuff like that to make it look as pretty as possible. I changed it into this:

So, this is an example of a manual text gradient.

This is a very fast way to create a gradient, as well. Instead of hand doing each color, you simply choose how many colors you're using, put in the hex code for each, and type/paste in your text. However, before you generate the code, make sure you use the drop down and change it to Generic Forum Code. It takes up lots more characters in your post, leaving you with not as much room to write, and it also gives each letter/character a hashtag [#] with each hex code. Those will need to be gotten rid of for the gradient to be visible.

Graphic Gradients.

So, this section is gonna be a whole lot easier than the manual one, and it's usually what I do, if I have the resources. Now, for this type of gradient, you're going to have to have a form of Photoshop or GIMP. I use GIMP, so I'll be going by GIMP, for those of you who use Photoshop, you should be able to translate what I do on GIMP to what must be done on Photoshop. So, once downloaded, you're gonna go to 'file', 'new', and then change the dimensions to your liking and press 'ok' or something like that.

Once you're little blank canvas is up, you're gonna press the Biggish black 'A' on the Tool bar and type in your text and whatnot. Afterwards, you're gonna go to 'layer', 'transparency', and then 'alpha to selection'. Some little marching ants should pop up around the letters. You'll then click the gradient tool (the little square with a black and white gradient on it), and drag it across the letters. You should've chose the two colors you wanted by now.

And voila! Your gradient to your text is done! You'd save it and stuff, and then upload it and post it on here like any other picture.

Formatting.

So we're off of gradients now, and into making posts look pretty and consistent! Of course, you could add one of these gradients to your posts, and it'll make your post look that much better.

This section will consist of ways to make your posts look:

• professional
  
• longer
  
• unique
  
• better than they actually are (not saying that they're not great, but it's like a generic soda over a name brand soda, they're both the same basically, but the name brand soda is usually preferred because of packaging, etc.)
  
• consistent
  
• more experienced
  

Professional and Longer.

We'll be starting with the first section of the list, making your posts look more professional. Making your post look more professional and experienced will also make your post longer, so when you don't see a paragraph or two on making your post look longer (notice I didn't say it actually was longer), don't freak out, because everything there is to know is in this little section.

To make your post look more professional/longer, the first thing you need to do is size=1 your posts! It's not that hard, simply highlight your post, and click the button with a big 'A' and a smaller 'A' and edit the 2 into a 1. Just by doing that it looks like you've had months more experience than you actually do. You could then BLOCKQUOTE your post! It makes it all neat and not touch the little post borders and will make it look even longer. To do this, there's a black arrow that's pointing towards the right.
And then BAM! A whole different post. Would you rather see:

Or:

Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel.

If you're anybody like me or the others on the site, the answer is the previous one.

Unique.

There are tons of ways to make your posts look more unique. Instead of just posting something that's size=1ed and blockquoted, you could center it as well, and it ends up with a whole different effect. See below:

Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel.

Centered along with blockquoted and size=1ed;

Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel. Betty Lu jumped across a pile of poo to grab a gardening shovel.

See how they're completely different? You still get the professionalism and longevity of it, but it looks more unique and to fit your personality.

Not only could you do that, but for each paragraph you could put a symbol, such as • or ♦. For each paragraph, you would add one more. So for two paragraphs, it'd be:

♦ Paragraph here.

♦♦ Second paragraph here.

There's an endless amount of ways to make your posts look unique. Play around with the UBBC buttons and see what you come up with! You never know, you might start a new trend on the site! Though that would get rid of the unique factor, .

In Conclusion.

In conclusion we've found a lot of things that could make our posts look 20x better than they usually do, and a new way to make your words two different colors without being all choppy and crap (Gradients.)! I hope you enjoyed reading this, and... I'll be happy to see what you guys have mustered up from this guide!

<333

- Skylar.