Maisy’s-21st-Century-Blue-Plastic-Smilies


I’ve changed some of my SMILIES today.

I created these in Photoshop Elements 2
Using the WOW-Plastic Style as a base.

My motivation for creating new Smilies myself was: I suddenly had the inspiration of what to do: use Photoshop Elements as I use it to make other graphics, using the neat stuff in it makes for poppier smilies. Small, not so impact-visual, but they are softer, like a gel-plastic, and that’s exactly what I want them to look like, not like hard ugly little dark blobs of blue or yellow that are flat, flat, flat.

All but one of them are PNG graphics. and the animated one is, of course a GIF graphic. I’ll be making more of these smilies soon. Here are what I have thus far:

:blush:

Blush

๐Ÿ˜Ž

Cool

๐Ÿ˜ฅ

Cry

๐Ÿ˜ฎ

Eek

:laugh:

Laugh

๐Ÿ˜†

LOL

๐Ÿ™

Sad

๐Ÿ˜ฏ

Shocked

๐Ÿ™‚

Smile

:verysad:

Very Sad

:veryshocked:

Very Shocked

๐Ÿ˜‰

Wink

All the above are 20 x 20 pixels, 72 res.

The PNG’s are transparent … meaning good for light and dark backgrounds. The GIF has a white matte so it’s for light/white backgrounds. I loaded this post in IE and it looked alright, but in Firefox I had to do alot of editing to make it look right. So when I did the best I could, the PNG’s started showing up in IE with little light gray backgrounds around them. That’s wrong. In Firefox they look as they should. — OK, IE must have loaded old graphics the first times, then the right ones as I forgot, IE doesn’t load PNG right. So now I have a script installed and the pictures are filtered via a ms alpha filter, but they are loading and dissappearing instantly. Reload the page and you’ll see them for a split second. In Firefox they are as true as ever though, since it handles PNG as it should. Microsoft’s browsers don’t support it. Reason enough for y’all to quit using IE, just another example of why they are not compliant to web standards by far. Get Firefox, see my sidebar at the bottom for the link. It’s a safer browser to use, as well as displaying PNG correctly . I have to look into the script deal to see WHY the smilie PNG’s are not staying with the filter in place. Without it, the little gray backgrounds are there with the smilies. Maybe it’s better to not see them at all rather than those uglies. I don’t want to use matted gifs, as they aren’t truly transparent and won’t go on both my white pages and my colored pages, as I have colors on my comment sections. I want truly gymnastic graphics. As any webber would really want in spending time making them. :veryshocked:

Hmph. ๐Ÿ™

UPDATE: OK, in the vars php file where the smilie codes are stored, in order to fix the flashing dissappearing png’s I had to add the width and height to the image code. It’s not so straightforward as that’s a script that pulls the real image url and adds it to the code. All the smilies aren’t the same size right now, as I only redid some of them. I did the ones I use though, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for now.

In any case, this is something that should be fixed in either the PNG fixing script, or in WP in the vars …have it get the image size. It really should be WP to do it, as that’s more webstandard, to have the size loaded with the image. Yes, even little bitty smilies.

Mine aren’t SO SMALL, bigger than my old ones, but just as big as some folks smilies at just 20px squared.

OK, here the link to the place with the script.

http://www.webfx.nu/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

Read the page there, and download the package at the end. You’ll have to upload the .prc file to your site (I recommend you go inside and find the src code for “blank.gif” and code it to have your site url on the front of it so you can use this script throughout your site.) upload the “blank.gif” file, and place an img tag in your CSS file. Really super simple to be able to do that and use PNG graphics freely!

Handy, works, just be sure to have all png’s you ever use to have the width and height in the src line. This is a freeing deal, in that once one has this on their site, encoded right, they can use PNG’s, which are nice since they ARE TRANSPARENT … like this:

cool_oh png graphic should show up in IE as transparent

The above is made of the basic elements of what I made the other smilies out of, but eclectically put together for a special GIANT SMILIE! ๐Ÿ™‚ All the smilies look better at larger sizes, oh, at least 50px, but smilies just shouldn’t be that big. With this special gal, as I’d say this smilie is a girl, you can see that the elements are indeed plastiky looking, and cuter, though gaudy to a degree ๐Ÿ˜‰ Smaller than this, but bigger than the actual smilies installed they aren’t as gaudy. :laugh:

Anyhow, I’ll be doing more of these and fixing the ones above up a bit probably as well, in time.


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