Welcome to the shiny and new Fan Art section here at RPGamer. Let's start things off with a little tour of the new design.

• The Submissions. Directly above, you should see the submission lineup for this week. In standards-compliant web browsers, you'll see a nifty little mouseover effect when you roll over the text to the left of a submission's thumbnail image. If you click on that section, the box in the right column will load lots of information about the piece including the title, link to the full image, artist, link to the artist's RPGamer gallery, medium and artist's comments (if provided by the artist), and information on the game and characters depicted. You can also click on a submission's thumbnail image and the full image will open in a new window as usual. The submission bars are color coded to indicate what type of submission they are: gold for fan art, red for costumes, and possibly some other color for fanimation. Colors will also play other roles in special events like contests.


• This Box. Yup, you still get the pleasure of reading my ramblings. Since artist comments are now back in action, you probably won't get as much silly commentary from me on submissions, though I might still throw in a comment or two. The title of each update is in the bar right above all this text. The subtitle is gone because, oddly enough, that usually took as long to think up as it did to do the entire remainder of the update. I changed my signature line a little bit.


• The Message Forum Link. Hopefully adding the link to each week's forum discussion thread will get some more talk going about the week's submissions and other matters of fan art, fanimation, and costumes. If it's on the page, feel free to talk about it. Be kind with your critiques. Offer constructive suggestions if you like, make requests for pieces you'd like to see, or discuss my latest pick for "anime girl of the week."


• The Right Menu. All the information you'll need to submit is there at the top of the right-hand menu. There are also links to the gallery archives and my biography (which also has my e-mail address). By popular demand, Fan Art now has an update archive that doesn't consist of one big column of dates down the right side. Below all that is the space where oodles of information will appear when you click on each submission. Further down is a summary of any contests that are currently running. Underneath that is a list of the most recent requests made by readers. At the bottom, you'll see a section full of miscellaneous goodies simply known as "kweee's corner."


• Technical Specs. Obviously this was a pretty hefty overhaul to implement all of the new features. While some of these things look pretty flashy, pretty much all of it is stuff that any standards-compliant web browser can handle. Some of the many browsers I tested handle a few items a little differently. Most notably, I had to do a couple of "interesting things" to get certain features working in Internet Explorer. First off, the mouseover highlight effect for submissions doesn't work in IE, though you can still click in the area to the left of a submission's thumbnail to load the information in the box on the right.
  
  I'm also a fairly big fan of the PNG image format because it lets me do fun things like alpha channel transparency. Wherever you see a slant in this new design, you're looking at an alpha'd PNG. If you look closely at submission thumbnails, you'll see that the slants to the left and right have a slight "fading" effect. That's the wonders of alpha channeling at work. Sadly, Internet Explorer still does not have native support for alpha'd PNGs, so IE users would normally see light blue in place of the transparent parts of the PNG. To get around this, I added a very tiny JavaScript snippet that will automatically implement a fix to enable alpha channel PNGs on this page for IE users. If you're using IE and you see some freaky light blue polygons in the area of submission thumbnails, you probably don't have JavaScript turned on. It's no big deal, but you'll just miss out on a nifty little feature.
  
  The only other noteworthy difference you may notice between browsers is the artist's comments box. It's implemented as an IFRAME (not to be confused with the more infamous FRAME), and IFRAME formatting seems to differ wildly from browser to browser. For example, Firefox likes to make the IFRAME's background transparent, while IE and Opera just want it to be white or perhaps the same background as the file that's being loaded into the IFRAME. No big deal here.
  
  There may be other minor differences between browsers, including a couple extra rows of pixels here and there. It's all done in nice, relatively clean CSS, so you should get something reasonable looking in any browser. I've tested it extensively in IE, Firefox, and Opera and to lesser extents in another half-dozen browsers, so I don't expect there to be any big problems. Here is a screenshot of what the design looks like in Firefox. If you're getting something substantially different or broken in your browser, please feel free to let me know. Screenshots of what you're seeing would help greatly.


• Other Recent Changes. One last reminder about the other changes and additions from the last few weeks. The fan art gallery archives have been overhauled with thumbnails and a prettier layout. We also now accept submissions of Fanimation and Cosplay Costumes, so check out the updated Submission Guidelines for more details.


• Still To Do. Lots! The update archives only go back until 2004, but I'll be filling that in over time with every update I can find floating around. I'm also working on an archive of all the old tutorials contributed by artists and former curators. The gallery archives also need to be filled in with a couple years of submissions. I've also been alerted to one instance of an artist's archive that somehow got mashed in with another artist's archive. Please take a look at your archive and make sure there aren't pieces from other artists crawling around in it. If there are, please let me know and I'll fix it right away. If you only started submitting in the last couple of years, you may not have an archive established yet or it may be missing some of your submissions.


• Attention OmniArtists! The deadline for your quarter-final entries is this Monday at 11:59pm Pacific Time. If your entry doesn't get in by then, you'll be out of the running for the $600 cash prize. The following OmniArt 2005 Quarter-Finalists have already sent in their entries as of the time this column went up: Nyanko, S.C., David Mitchell, animetayl, Jamie Jennings, GlassShard. If your name is not in that list, your entry did not arrive! Resend it, or send it, or something! I've also been sending out confirmation of all contest entries received. I know many of you are still putting on the finishing touches, but please keep an eye on your clocks and calendars. I'll send out confirmation e-mails as I receive the entries, though I'll probably stop doing so at least a few hours before the deadline. Please contact me with any questions or concerns at the e-mail address listed in my biography.

I hope you all enjoy the new design! It's largely in its final state, though I'm perfectly happy to consider some new features for down the line. If you think of something you'd like to see here, give me a holler. Otherwise, enjoy the art, keep an eye out for OmniArt 2005 voting which starts on October 17th, keep sending in your creations, and stay tuned for new features, contests, and assorted happy stuff in the coming weeks and months.

Nick Ferris is a witty quote.