Whipped this up for a Das Wilde message dump, which was made more or less for the express purpose of getting that image on the forums. For how simple it was to make, I think it turned out pretty well... though I find it a little creepy that I just happened to pick up that matrix-style thing that seems to be in the same font the Keepers use...
The Chris Collective helped me find a decent font for it, and I learned about playing with the hue... which is really fun. That background used to be red.
Also, I'd like to point out a thankee to Exile for sharing the pile of space pics that I've been dissecting and using while I mess around with the Gimp.
There's a 60ish opacity layer of solid black between the text and everything under it, which is responsible for some of the blur. Part of it is also that the brush I used for the Matrix-style stuff had to be significantly resized, and some more comes from the fact that the original background was a 1900x1200 red nebula. The hue modifications took a lot of precision from it. There's some loss in the lightning too, but that was intentional since I picked the spread ones rather than the focused bolts.
Blurred is probably the best word for the background:P
Looking at your stuff, that second one is veeeeery nice. Love the picture of the guy, and the shapes move well. Though I was expecting to see "IND" on the side rather than "Gaians".
Can't say I'm sure what the first one is for... that a whale in there?