Userbar

Userbars are small rectangular images that are designed to be put in an Internet forum signature block. Userbars may be animated if the artist wishes. They are often used to show the user's interests, hobbies, or graphical skills. Userbar standards are often strictly defined and enforced by communities to ensure that they all have a neat appearance when animated or when stacked vertically. Although there is some variation, most are not wider than 350 pixels and not higher than 19 pixels so they can fit in with other userbars. Many userbars are as little as 1kb. Some may be larger depending on animation size.

Common specifications

Although userbars can vary greatly, most of them share the following specifications and elements:
* Width of 350 pixels
* Height of 19 pixels
* Translucent, diagonal stripes at 45° to give a scan line effect.
* Some have different patterns, such as lines at various degrees, bricks, diagonal bricks, cross, and dots.
* Have a gradient or solid color in the background.
* The font mostly used is "Visitor TT2 (BRK)". Not bold, no anti-aliasing, with a 1 pixel stroke.
* Other fonts also used are "Mini 7 Tight" and "Silkscreen."
* Encoded in the PNG file format for good quality or GIF for animation
* Sometimes glossy effect, done by placing a translucent half-oval at the top of the image to give the illusion of depth.

Userbars are created either using web applications at certain web sites or with standalone graphics applications on the user's computer.

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See Also

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