Now I'm sure a lot of you would love some sigging tips right? Well sure you would! So here are some I think can help you:

Text:
Ah text.. something that can singlehandedly kill a sig if it's bad. So, always try and keep text simple and clean unless your sig needs something wild. Try and use fonts like Times New Roman and Arial for text because they will always look good. Make sure you make the text big enough to read but not a huge distraction in the sig. Also, try and keep the text near the focal. Having it somewhere in the corner will do you no good, so put it somewhere by the focal but not some place where it's a distraction. Now for fonts... Again, Times and Arial always look purdy especially if you change the colors and add some effects to match the sig. Say your doing a... space sig with stars... maybe put the text with a color that matches and get your pen tool and stroke but make the brush scattered (PS) or the sparks brush in gimp but set to a low size then change it to a color that matches. Although, if your sig has a crazy vector theme going on or something, try and put a font that matches with it because Times can look pretty boring in a sig like that. A perfect font is Levibrush which you can get from dafont.com.


Lighting:

Lighting is a sexy thing that can add some depth to a sig if done right. One of the best ways to give good lighting is the dodge/burn tools. All you have to do is get the dodge tool and put a soft brush on it and just put it where you want the lighting to be. The burn tool is also good cause you can darken the edges of the sig to give more focas on the focal. Dodging and burning are also good for coloring because they make colors look seriously cool if done right. Another effective way to do lighting, which I use all the time, is to use the gradient tool. Click the setting where it's just your FG color to transparent and then put it on the circle setting. Make a circle where you want the lighting in any color and just leave it like that or put it on a cool layer setting like screen or color dodge.


FOCAL!

The focal is probably the most important thing of the sig. It's basically the thing where you want people to look at. For example, your render or stock or vector or whatever it is you use is probably going to be the focal. You always want to make sure people instantly catch on to your focal and keep their main focus there. A good way to make people notice your focal is to have correct lighting and blurring the background around the focal and sharpening the focal point. Blurring and sharpening are probably the best one though. Lighting is important too, so don't forget that.


Depth

I'm sure all of you have heard pro siggers or siggers like me, shooter, and ikarou say the word depth a lot. Well if you don't know what it is, I'll tell you. Depth basically makes the sig look almost 3d'ish. Blurring the background is a good way to add depth because the farther something is, the blurrier it gets. So if you make the render still be the same, it'll make the render look like it's popping out of the background or something. Again, blurring is probably the best way to add depth but there are more. Adding stuff over your render and keeping a lot behind it also adds it. Depth is important and adds a clean look to sigs too.


Well those are basic tips that can help you greatly in sigging and other art if you listen to them. Btw I will add pictures and such soon, I'm just tired right now ;-;

Oh, and this is basically a rip-off of Shooter's topic except for.. well everyone to use.

7/10 guide
You cover some more intermediate points, but don't execute a definition right. The text portion hits the nail on the head and is overall flawless.
The lighting section is extremely vague and mis-imformative. The doge and burn tools are good for final effects to lighting, but using them for an entire lighting scheme makes your piece look terrible most of the time.
The focal section is fairly well done but the blurring thing is a beginners tool.
I'm not even going to get started on depth, although your definition of something that isn't real is fairly good.

Yes I know what you mean. I really only touched the surface for most of the stuff just so I can give people a basic idea of their options.

If you want a detailed guide, look at Shooter's :D.

Font section is flawless? He's only scratching the surface of all the creative things you can do with text, but meh.

Depth is made up? :S

Anyway, good guide would read again.

In a tutorial that seems mainly for beginners that's all that you need to know to start off.