Hi, snarkie!
Hope you are well.
First, I’d like to thank you for your amazing work on Neopets. I really miss the old times!
I read your answer for the question “What Happened to Avatars?” and I’d like to ask you a question (actually two!) about it. What is your favorite Avatar? Which Avatar wasn’t created by you?
Thank you so much!
Hi! You’re very welcome! I’m really glad so many people enjoyed our shenanigans.
I don’t remember ever having a single favourite avatar! But I always liked the ones that weren’t regular squares or circles, where I got to break the mould a bit and do something funky. Heh. Off-hand I can remember the Darkest Faerie one for sure. I really liked doing the “hair” for that one! I felt very clever. Or like the Taelia or Baby Kougra ones. The slimy one. Mutant Quiggle? The one that has the “scratches” through it. Darigan… Pteri? That kind of thing. And I always enjoyed getting to animate something other than just the words. Sparkles! I did a lot of sparkles. Things like that.
I think I mention briefly in that other answer that I “pixellated” mine, so you can usually tell fairly easily which ones were mine by the edges or text. I did mine in Photoshop, so I could alias for “proper” pixellation. The artists did theirs in Flash, which smoothed everything out. (And also made things seem kind of blurry at that size.) So a good example would be… those generic Pirate ones if I remember right. (Aisha? Krawk? The greyish ones that said PIRATE [SPECIES].) Or actually, Better Than You. Aliased text is a dead giveaway. Also since the artists used Flash, whereas I usually did each frame manually (again, because Photoshop), their animations were much smoother. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head but yeah, if the animation is SUPER SMOOTH, chances are it was a Flash one made by an artist. They did eventually do some in Photoshop while I was still there so that’s probably not a definitive rule but it’s a good gauge. But the lack of super-defined pixellation is the best way to tell, I think!
Thanks for your question! Stay safe!