Profile Portraits Guide

This Profile Portraits Guide is re-used/re-shaped with permission from its author Daniel Newton, a Mod at AnimeVice.com

With profile images we want to avoid things like full body shots and images where the character or person is disappearing into the distance. Depending on the image, sometimes a character or person's face isn't even visible when that image becomes an icon.

Cropping the Image

 * Dimensions: 300 x 450 (position the face within the top 300 x 300 pixels)


 * Format: PNG (small icons look horrible in JPG format)


 * Preferred Sources: high resolution photos, high quality screen captures

Do Not Use: transparent PNG of GIF, vector trace, fan art, old pictures. Try to find the most recent picture of the person or character.

Uploading/Naming/Applying
When uploading an image please make sure that the file name will make it easy to search for. Keep it simple. Use the character or person’s name. Use numbering if there are multiple images for the same character/person etc.


 * 1) If there is more than one image for a person or character, create a gallery in the body of the page and add them all there.

Here are some examples using these guidelines:

As you can see, the images are consistent. This format should work for 90% of the people and characters, with the exceptions being things like monsters and other non-humanoid characters, for those we can just use 300 x 300 images.

Tutorial
For those of you having trouble re-sizing and cropping images, here's a tutorial to hopefully make things a little easier. This tutorial uses Paint.NET, a free image editor for Windows (sorry Mac/Linux users) though if you use Adobe Photoshop this guide may still be helpful.

This tutorial will show you how to create profile portraits and show you where to upload the images.

Tools
Paint.NET (download for free here)

Materials
Template Image (download here)

Character/Person Image. For this tutorial I used this image of Eddard Stark from Game of Thrones.