Noventicons

Smileys are, of course, the SOUL-DESTROYING WORK OF THE CLOVEN-HOOFED ONE (and anyone who refers to them as ‘Emoticons’ needs badly to be set alight), but the above piccies are something rather different. They were drawn as a sort of experiment on behalf of fab story-writing gent and mailing list-operator Chris Zawadzki, he whose brain-thinkings led to the creation of Ino and Agaroth, for use upon his Livejournal. Between us we devised the notion that instead of using smileys at the end of journal entries to convey your current mood (which by that point would surely be obvious from the message’s content), you could instead change your avatar image when making a new entry - this would tell readers what to expect from your message right at the beginning and, more importantly, would look really nifty. I went about designing the above avatars to see how it would work - also, to see how fast I could colour them - and delightfully, they came out exactly as we’d hoped (in just a few days as well, which for me is practically unheard of). Who needs those creepy little grinning yellow things, eh?

Incidentally, the wolfy guy is called Noventa (hence the punny title) - he’s another of Chris’ characters and the sort of chap who’s not afraid to show his emotions, and so was quite a fitting subject. As is traditional, he’s copyrighted like you wouldn’t believe to the person who thought him up - for more information, send an SAE (Stamped Addressed E-mail) to the following location.

Matthew Smith

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