Hey all,
I just finished writing a post on my blog titled
Choosing the Right Smilies
In it I go into great detail explaining the advantage of using "pixelized" smilies, and explain the infamous "halo" effect. I've provided many screenshots to use as example.
It took me a good 3-4 hours to write the post (A lot of the time was spent uploading smilies to my forum and showing before and after shots on different backgrounds and such) and so I thought it'd be a useful resource to share here for other forum administrators.
Anyhow, enjoy. Hopefully one or two people learned something new about smilies