Tier 1: Long Form Tasks (800+ words)
3) Write 800 words or more on something that interests you. It could be related to statistics, to a league issue you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 800 words about your team’s Werewolf server. Be warned that freedom comes with risk, and this category will be judged especially stringently for anyone trying to spew complete nonsense.
Although I’ve tried to be involved in the league in various ways through media, graphics, and development, I’d say that graphics is of highest interest to me as an outlet. Creating photo manipulations and banner-type graphics has always been of interest to me. As a kid I’d spend hours watching tutorials and tweaking settings to learn the ins and outs of all of the different tools that programs like GIMP and Photoshop had to offer. Coupled with an interest in photography, I was able to self-teach fundamentals to a reasonably good level. Graphics as a hobby allowed me to be hired for a graphics position during my college years, where I spent my working hours doing background research on subject matter and composing hundreds of different standardized graphics. It has been quite a few years since that time, and for a while I’d completely forgotten about how interesting I’d always found making graphics, but in finding this league I’ve rediscovered a hobby that I’ve been able to merge with other hobbies in a way I hadn’t been able to previously.
![[Image: 65xX0CY.png]](https://i.imgur.com/65xX0CY.png)
This is the first sig that I’d ever made for sim sports. I like to think that I’ve grown a lot in many different facets of my work in the last six or so months that I’ve been making graphics in the league, but that opinion would probably vary person to person. In the time between then and now I’ve done a lot of research around similar sig and graphic formats in both forums and on social media sites like Instagram. I keep a personal Pinterest board specifically dedicated to sports graphics for inspiration that I use as a “mood board” of sorts. This has been one of the most useful things I’ve found for sig inspiration. If I’m ever in a creative rut around a style or composition I’d like to use, I end up going back to that board to borrow aspects of graphics that I like. There are also a lot of great resources in other sim leagues that I’ve found useful. While I don’t participate in other leagues, their graphics boards all have fundamental similarities that I have learned from techniques that I have borrowed.
At some point a couple seasons ago I was convinced to become a graphics grader. I think that being a grader is a good opportunity for anybody who is interested in a particular facet of the league. Being on the other side of the table so to speak is a great learning opportunity that allows you to see the larger picture of things like media or graphics. I don’t think that a good graphics creator is necessarily a good graphics grader, though. Creating graphics and judging graphics are two very different skill sets. It is true that a good graphics judge should be able to recognize quality and effort in a signature, but in my opinion providing a structured and informative critique is one of the best differentiators between an average and a great grader. Although most people who submit graphics are purely looking for the money that comes out of it, it is nice to know that some folks are truly more interested in getting better with the software that they are using and developing useful skills ( okay, maybe this is a pipe dream but let a guy dream for a second ). It has been nice to be able to provide detailed feedback to users to both help them make more money in the league and to provide them resources for learning better fundamentals for creating graphics. An interesting thing to note here is that most, if not all of the feedback that we give as graders isn’t sig-specific by any means. The feedback is applicable to pictures in general; this knowledge could be useful for other artistic mediums like photography, drawing, painting, etc. Understanding things like the composition of a picture and fundamental layout approaches are important skills for more than just signatures, and understanding those will help you to have a better eye for creating and viewing art.
Although I don’t currently do much development work for the league, I think that merging my skills as a developer with my skills as a graphics creator would be something I’d like to pursue inside the context of this league in the future. In particular, there are projects like an “ultimate team” game where users buy card packs and maintain collections of player cards that I would like to contribute graphics to. I enjoy making player cards just as much as I enjoy making sigs, so I think working on something like that could be a good time. Additionally, there are development-related tasks like programmatically generating overlays for cards that would align with things like rarity that I think would be neat to figure out. This project is a pretty large undertaking, but I think that it would be a cool concept to increase community engagement.
3) Write 800 words or more on something that interests you. It could be related to statistics, to a league issue you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 800 words about your team’s Werewolf server. Be warned that freedom comes with risk, and this category will be judged especially stringently for anyone trying to spew complete nonsense.
Although I’ve tried to be involved in the league in various ways through media, graphics, and development, I’d say that graphics is of highest interest to me as an outlet. Creating photo manipulations and banner-type graphics has always been of interest to me. As a kid I’d spend hours watching tutorials and tweaking settings to learn the ins and outs of all of the different tools that programs like GIMP and Photoshop had to offer. Coupled with an interest in photography, I was able to self-teach fundamentals to a reasonably good level. Graphics as a hobby allowed me to be hired for a graphics position during my college years, where I spent my working hours doing background research on subject matter and composing hundreds of different standardized graphics. It has been quite a few years since that time, and for a while I’d completely forgotten about how interesting I’d always found making graphics, but in finding this league I’ve rediscovered a hobby that I’ve been able to merge with other hobbies in a way I hadn’t been able to previously.
This is the first sig that I’d ever made for sim sports. I like to think that I’ve grown a lot in many different facets of my work in the last six or so months that I’ve been making graphics in the league, but that opinion would probably vary person to person. In the time between then and now I’ve done a lot of research around similar sig and graphic formats in both forums and on social media sites like Instagram. I keep a personal Pinterest board specifically dedicated to sports graphics for inspiration that I use as a “mood board” of sorts. This has been one of the most useful things I’ve found for sig inspiration. If I’m ever in a creative rut around a style or composition I’d like to use, I end up going back to that board to borrow aspects of graphics that I like. There are also a lot of great resources in other sim leagues that I’ve found useful. While I don’t participate in other leagues, their graphics boards all have fundamental similarities that I have learned from techniques that I have borrowed.
At some point a couple seasons ago I was convinced to become a graphics grader. I think that being a grader is a good opportunity for anybody who is interested in a particular facet of the league. Being on the other side of the table so to speak is a great learning opportunity that allows you to see the larger picture of things like media or graphics. I don’t think that a good graphics creator is necessarily a good graphics grader, though. Creating graphics and judging graphics are two very different skill sets. It is true that a good graphics judge should be able to recognize quality and effort in a signature, but in my opinion providing a structured and informative critique is one of the best differentiators between an average and a great grader. Although most people who submit graphics are purely looking for the money that comes out of it, it is nice to know that some folks are truly more interested in getting better with the software that they are using and developing useful skills ( okay, maybe this is a pipe dream but let a guy dream for a second ). It has been nice to be able to provide detailed feedback to users to both help them make more money in the league and to provide them resources for learning better fundamentals for creating graphics. An interesting thing to note here is that most, if not all of the feedback that we give as graders isn’t sig-specific by any means. The feedback is applicable to pictures in general; this knowledge could be useful for other artistic mediums like photography, drawing, painting, etc. Understanding things like the composition of a picture and fundamental layout approaches are important skills for more than just signatures, and understanding those will help you to have a better eye for creating and viewing art.
Although I don’t currently do much development work for the league, I think that merging my skills as a developer with my skills as a graphics creator would be something I’d like to pursue inside the context of this league in the future. In particular, there are projects like an “ultimate team” game where users buy card packs and maintain collections of player cards that I would like to contribute graphics to. I enjoy making player cards just as much as I enjoy making sigs, so I think working on something like that could be a good time. Additionally, there are development-related tasks like programmatically generating overlays for cards that would align with things like rarity that I think would be neat to figure out. This project is a pretty large undertaking, but I think that it would be a cool concept to increase community engagement.
![[Image: 5fKn9dY.png]](https://i.imgur.com/5fKn9dY.png)
