Clickin’ embiggens.

Late yesterday, I decided to make a signature image for forums relating to Star Trek/STO.

I wanted to incorporate one of my ships, my captains, and so on and so forth to personalize it.

I took screenshots in-game and lifted the various components off their backgrounds, and merged the images together last night. It didn’t take that long. I added the text that I wanted, spending about 10 minutes trying out different fonts, finally settling on the one used for the Original Series titles. (I tried out TNG, DS9, various movie fonts, stuff that appeared onscreen in the shows, and about everything else Trek-ish I could think of).

All told, all that took maybe an hour and a half.

But I didn’t like it. I really didn’t have a space to put my in-game name or forum name short of making a frame around the pic or just randomly placing it in the image, which I didn’t think suited it. So I decided to use a sort of Star Trek computer interface (LCARS) to tie it together and give me text spaces.

So, before going to sleep, I tried to find a simplistic guide to creating LCARS – just how to place the colours, what formats and layouts the various shows used, and so on. I bookmarked a couple of pages, and resumed today when I was functional for the day. Then, the more I read, the more I wanted to be accurate.. and there was a lot of contradictory info out there. So I read, and searched, and searched and read…

I just finished this 15 minutes ago, after agonizing over every decision. I kept getting hung up on details and flaws. It is neither perfectionism nor OCD, as it isn’t really entirely right – I took some minor liberties, and it is far from perfect. I just wanted it to be sort-of right, and not have glaring inconsistencies with established designs. Yet, it has still taken me around 6 hours to do what should have been the EASY part when it only took 90 minutes to do the “hard” part.

And this, folks, is why I will never be a graphic designer.

There is a contest on StarTrek.com and the prize is one of these:

I’ve wanted one for ages. It isn’t trivia or a skill/knowledge thing; the question is:

“What kind of pizza would you cut with the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter?”

This is my answer:

It’s a random selection since it’s a “Sweepstakes” and not a best-answer thing, so it won’t matter that I spend a half an hour photoshopping a Romulan Bird of Pizza.

But hey… I had to enter. It was a moral imperative.

*EDIT*

I added to the above image to show the proper use of the product:

I’ll just leave this right here.

My weapon of choice is my +10 Vorpal Reason Blade of Theological Refutation.