Max, I hope you don't mind that I keep commenting on your signatures, but I think enough pages have passed and it's different again and I always love seeing what you change it to. The colored gifset is an interesting change, and I like the sharpness of the images. I also like that the font you used for the quote also comes in an outline form (or you made it into an outline?) - it keeps the consistency of the quote but still makes the second part different.
/ninja'd
Ludus, I love the minimal use of color in yours - they're all very elegant colors, and the center image is quite intriguing. Actually, the whole thing is making me ask a lot of questions and I want to look up where that stuff is from, especially since the images on the sides look like playing cards, but "blades" isn't a suit I tend to see. The text above and below the center image work very nicely to fill the space that the side images create there, so on the whole the space seems evenly filled.
sorry a lot of my posts are rambling comments