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Every self respecting player has their own custom made spray logo, or player decal. Whether it's a greyscale original or a multi-colour wad. If you want to make a standard logo you can use programs such as PaintBrush to do a very good job. I can remember when people first figured out how to make multi-coloured logos, I was one of the first people to have made one. Conversation was fun :) "OMG, what's that big thing on the wall there!??", "oh, that's my logo :)".
Anyway, on to how to do it. I recommend standard logos for those who haven't done anything like this before.
Your image has to be 64 pixels by 64 pixels, and has to have a grayscale colour table. So just select Gray colours in your graphics editor. The trick is to draw your picture inverse, as in black is transparent and white is as solid as it gets.
Simply save your logo as a Bitmap (BMP) in your Half-Life logo's directory. By default this is: "C:\SIERRA\Half-Life\logos\". Then start up Half-Life or CS, and go to Multiplayer, and customise. You will then be able to find your logo in one of the selectable set.
Everybody's favourite type, big, and colourful. You can take any image and turn it into a logo. It's always best to make your own though :) A more advanced graphics editor is probably best for this kind of thing. I personally use Adobe Photoshop as it offers everything that is needed.
Once again the output of the file has to be in bitmap, and has to have a full 256-colour table. It doesn't matter what the colours are though. The last colour is your transparent colour. The image file size must not be any bigger than 15KB, otherwise the server will not accept it.
The physical dimensions of the image must be between 16x16 to 256x256 pixels. Either side may vary, but it must always be a multiple of 16. So 48x80 is valid, 37x93 is not. Now due to the server not accepting files larger than 15KB you are limited to 96x96 (although you can extend one edge if you reduce the other).
Once you have finished your picture you need to save it, but this is where things get different. Save it as '{logo.bmp'. It is named this for a reason. You then have to parse this image through the Half-Life Texture SDK. Which you can download from here. Download the file, and extract it to a suitable location. Find the root directory (you'll see "makels.exe" and other exe's in there) and create a new directory called "MyDecal", then copy your '{logo.bmp' into the new directory.
Load the file "makewad.bat" into notepad (or any other text editor) and change:
makels samples samplewad samples.ls
qlumpy samples.ls
to this:
makels mydecal tempdecal tempdecal.ls
qlumpy tempdecal.ls
Now run the "makewad.bat" file (making sure that there isn't more than 1 image in the MyDecal directory). Hopefully two files will be created. The one that you are after is called "TEMPDECAL.WAD". Copy this file into your mod directory. So, if you wanted to use this logo in CS, by default you should put it in C:\SIERRA\Half-Life\cstrike\.
Your logo should now work in game, when you connect to test it, wait a minute first while the logo uploads to the server and downloads again. Make sure the server supports custom logos too (most do).
NB: If you ever go into the customise menu and then click either OK or Cancel your logo will be wiped, if you go in by accident press ESC to exit. It's probably best to set it all up how you like before installing your new logo. Or just use the console to customise your game.
This does not apply to Steam (i.e. >= CS 1.6) - for old skool change all instances of tempdecal to pldecal.