Learn the crucial steps of placing elements on an artboard and organizing it effectively for designing a project. The article provides insightful details on how to use text and frames to create a visually appealing banner using Photoshop.
Key Insights
- The process of designing a banner begins with understanding the text and what message it's supposed to convey. The text is then placed strategically on the artboard so readers can clearly see it.
- Using Photoshop, you can create text boxes, adjust their size, and place them in the desired location on your artboard. The move tool is helpful in positioning and centering the text.
- You can enhance the visual appeal of your banner by adding frames that can hold pictures. Frames can be resized and positioned as per the design requirements, and they help in providing a vision of what the final artboard will look like.
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In this video we'll begin placing elements on our artboard. Whenever I start designing a project, I often like to look at the copy or text that a marketer sends to understand what the banner is supposed to convey.
Let's open our folder with the Phase 10 document copy, and we'll start looking at what Banner 1 says. It says, "With dozens of ongoing projects from San Diego all the way up to Seattle, there's no question that Phase 10 is the leading construction firm on the West Coast." Additionally, there's the statement below: "Building cities on the shoreline."
When I read this, I see that we've identified two cities, but we also want to convey that, ultimately, Phase 10 Construction is about multiple cities along the coast. So, thinking about that, images of buildings, a construction firm, and West Coast cities may be important for this banner.
Looking at this text, one idea that comes to mind for Banner 1 is to place the text in the middle so that readers can clearly see it at the top, followed by the statement below that reinforces the top statement.
To do this, let's move our text over to our Photoshop file. We can do this by triple-clicking the text here or highlighting it and pressing CTRL+C on the keyboard to copy it. Next, let's go back to our Photoshop file, and we'll create a text box right in the middle.
We'll use the Horizontal Type Tool in the toolbar, and we'll simply click and drag a box. We'll then paste our text using CTRL+V, and as we can see, the text is at the top, but it's far too small for now. Let's click the text and press CTRL+A to select all. In our options bar, let's change the size of this text.
I'll simply add a zero to make it 120 points and hit ENTER. All right, now we can see that we have our text at the top. Let's create a second layer below for our statement about building cities on the West Coast.
To do this, let's open our backup document, click and highlight it by triple-clicking, and press CTRL+C to copy. Going back to our Photoshop file, we'll add another text box by first clicking outside of the current text box, then clicking and dragging, and pressing CTRL+V.
We can see that we now have two text elements for our artboard. Next, let's title them.
In the Layers panel, we'll see that the top one, 'Building Cities on the Shoreline, ' is clearly titled and readable. However, for the bottom one, since there's more text than fits the title, let's retitle it by double-clicking and naming it 'Center Text.' Then, hit ENTER.
Next, I'll want to start organizing the artboard. We can do this easily by adding guides.
To add a guide, we'll go to our rulers on the left and top, then click and drag them into the artboard. If you don't see rulers, simply go to View and make sure that 'Rulers' is checked.
Next, we'll add some guides to our artboard. The first guide we'll add is our center guide, right in the middle. Since our artboard is 36 inches wide, we'll want to set it to 18 inches.
Additionally, if you hold Shift, it will move at each of the increments on the ruler. We'll leave it at 18 inches, and next, we'll add two more guides to split our canvas into thirds.
Since our canvas is 72 inches long, we'll click and drag, and the thirds will be at 24 inches.
Hold Shift and release at 24 inches, then click and drag one more at 48 inches, and release.
With our guides now set up, let's begin moving our text to the appropriate areas.
I want to place 'Building Cities on the Shoreline' on this line here to separate the bottom third, and we'll place this text right in the middle.
To do this, we'll use the Move Tool found at the top of the toolbar. Next, let's work on centering our text.
We want to center the 'Center Text' right here, in the middle, and place 'Building Cities on the Shoreline' on this line.
One way is to click and drag the text until we see that it's centered on the middle pink line, and then release.
Another method I sometimes use is clicking and dragging around, where we'll see multiple pink lines showing that the text is lining up with various elements.
We can click and release, then using the Text Tool, I'll click on the text and drag the edges of the text box to the edges of our artboard.
Next, we'll hold ALT on one side, and as we drag in, it will remain centered as we change the size of our text box.
We'll move it here, change the text box to be closer to the top, and now using the Move Tool, we'll click and simply move it up using Shift so it moves only vertically.
We'll make sure the lines are pink so it's centered, and then release it.
While these won't be the exact text styles we use, it's helpful to start visualizing our artboard.
As a final step, let's begin adding frames.
Frames signify that a picture will be placed there in the future, and they’re helpful because we can drop an image into the frame.
For this banner, we'll create one picture background, or one frame, to hold the top two-thirds of our artboard, and another frame for the bottom third.
We'll go to the Frame Tool found in the toolbar. To create a frame, we'll simply click on one end and drag it down until it’s flush with the bottom-right corner of the large X.
This signifies a frame.
Let's add one more frame. We'll drag from the bottom-right corner to the top-left corner and create a frame for the bottom third.
If the frame isn't exactly lined up, you can simply click and drag the corners to align it flush with the artboard.
We'll leave those there, and let's rename our frames.
With 'Frame 2' selected in our Layers panel, we'll retitle it 'Bottom Frame, ' and for the top frame, we'll double-click and rename it 'Top Frame.'
Let's click outside of this layer to review our work so far.
All right, we have our text on top, text between the two images, and two frames where we can drop photos.
Let’s save our work by pressing CTRL+S on the keyboard, and we're starting to get a picture of what our artboard or banner will look like.
In the next video, we’ll begin adding shapes to our artboard to stylize it.
See you there!