Making Signs

One of My Earliest Efforts and Two Recent Signs from the Robot Sanatorium

Written 29 July, 2008

Making Signs

I have a lot of fun making signs for Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom.

I made my first sign only a month or so after coming to Second Life. I used my ancient copy of Quark XPress to create a sign warning avatars they were wandering off my property into a neighbor’s kill zone.

It took me a while to figure out how to get that sign into the world. I wound up printing the Xpress file to Adobe Acrobat, cropping the image in Acrobat, and then exporting the image, creating a JPG which I would then load into Second Life. It was a pain, but it worked.

I’m only beginning to learn GIMP, the free image manipulation program from GNU—but GIMP has been an immense help in my sign making. I use it in combination with XPress (sometimes I start an image in XPress, then turn it into a JPG which I load into GIMP, and, after manipulation, export it as a non-lossy TGA or BMP, which I then import into XPress for touch-up.

I think my signs are much improved from the early days.