Tags (myspace comments) that don't suck

What separates the pretty from the mundane? How can I make something that other people will want to use on their site? It's an ever-evolving answer that I can only answer based on what's good now, and what's NOT appealing. A few hints, as you make your own tags:

1) Be sure to give your background a smooth look. My early tags all had this sharp, poor texture to it, because the image was just TOO clear. Remember, when you're adding something to a picture that's really well done (i.e. stock photography) you might want to tone down the sharpness, just a smidge. Blur tools, color adjustment (curves tool in Fireworks 8 is my current favorite) and sparkles all go a long way to giving your "picture" a more "comment" feel to it.

2) Text by itself isn't just boring, it's hard to read! Use outlines, glow, or bevel effects to distinguish text from background. If you don't, the text will either be too difficult to read, if it closely matches the background, or it will appear to just "sit" on top of your photograph, without looking like it belongs there.

3) If it's going on myspace, you'll most likely be making it animated. It sounds cliche, but that's myspace for you. Short attention spans, gaudy profiles, and pages that make most w3c members scream in agony are just par for the course, but hey, the customer's always right, right?

4) I know I already mentioned it, but for your own sakes, if you're making money off of it (ads on your site count) then you might be in copyright violation. If you're making your buddy look like superman holding a mcburger in front of disneyland... you're good. These images are perfectly fine for personal use.

Lastly, have fun with it! If you're not in it for fun, then what are you really doing?

The problem with photo copyrights

Half the stuff out there, showing up on everyone's profile, making people return to these websites... it's all copy-written. So, if everyone else is doing it, why won't I? Maybe it's stubbornness, and a general willingness to keep things as honest as possible. Part of it, though, is much simpler. Who wants to host a comment you can get at a thousand other sites?

I'll tell you who, it's the same people that got into the business thinking that they could get rich without showing any personal talent or creativity. Is this any different than getting used scripts to make a webpage work? By degrees, to be sure. When someone comes to my site, I want them to know that the comments are original. If they see that I didn't put my own website code together, I'll be okay. That's not what I'm going for. I want to take what's already out there, *esp. stuff that's not specifically copywritten and use that to create a website that people will use.

I wish every day that I had a little more experience. For sure, it would make things much more my own, and less like everything else that's out there, but when it comes to images and comments, there's too much that's a part of me to let something copy-written slip through.

If you're like everyone else out there, though, in that you're either not artist or webmaster, relax! It's enough to just put yourself out there, and show your personality using what you've got. Who knows... maybe there's an artist out there that would team up with us webmasters- I would certainly enjoy the opportunity to team up with like-minded artists. I'm sure the final product would be worth the collaboration.