Learn how to create a professional banner using Photoshop, perfect for pop-up events or presentations. This guide explores the process of designing a 4x6 banner for a fictional company, Phase 10 Construction, focusing on arranging, stylizing and exporting elements for an effective, captivating banner.
Key Insights
- The process begins by creating a new file in Photoshop, specifying details like file name, units of measurement and dimensions. For this 4x6 banner, dimensions are calculated in inches, with a resolution of 72, optimal for non-high definition materials.
- The design process includes incorporating various elements such as logos, title bars and artistic backgrounds. These elements are arranged and stylized as per client requests and needs. For example, the logo should be centered with the title bar and company name at the top.
- Any imported elements, like the artboard painting file used for the background, might need adjustments to fit the banner dimensions. This can include erasing extraneous parts and stretching the element to fill the banner. Photoshop's transform, eraser, and layer tools can make this process seamless.
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In this video, we'll be creating a banner. Many times in the field, I'll have the same clients who request logos to be created also request that I create marketing materials.
One common example is creating a banner for a pop-up event or to be able to use for a presentation. In this instance, we'll be working on a 4x6 banner for our fictional company, Phase 10 Construction. So let's begin.
We'll start by creating a new file and we can specify our own details. We'll start by giving it the name Phase 10 Construction Banner and next we'll change the units of measurement to inches. In addition, for our width, we can do the math ourselves or we can allow Photoshop to do the math by typing 12 times 6 or 12 inches times 6 feet.
We can see it's 72. For our height, since it's going to be 4 feet high, we'll do 4 times 12 and we have 72 × 48. For our resolution, we'll keep it at 72 since it's not that important that this banner needs to be high resolution.
However, if we were including photographs or things that need high definition, we could increase this to 300 for printing. In this instance, for our banner, we'll simply leave it at 72. We'll then click Create.
Next, let's save our work going to File, Save As, and we'll save this as Phase 10 Construction Banner and as a Photoshop file and click Save and OK. We're now ready to begin designing our banner. For our client's request, they've asked that we put the logo in the center of the banner along with a title bar and their construction name, Phase 10 Construction, up top.
In addition, they wanted some sort of artistic background to captivate the audience. Currently, we've already produced all the materials needed for this project. We'll simply arrange them, stylize and finish them and export them appropriately.
So let's begin exporting the first item, which is our watercolor background. We'll go to File, Open, and here we'll be opening our artboard painting file and click Open. With our artboard painting file open, we can select from one of the three artboards you've created with the paint tools, and in this instance, we'll be selecting the items found in artboard 1. So I'll go to artboard 1 and select the three different layers found in artboard 1. If we toggle our visibility, we'll see that these are the three layers in artboard 1. I'll then simply click and drag them into Phase 10 Construction banner and release.
The first thing that we'll notice is that it's no longer square and we also have some sort of green line below. If we look back to our artboard painting file, we can see why that is. Currently, the only paint found in artboard 1 is constrained to the file.
However, the actual layers are not constrained to that artboard. Therefore, when we've transferred it over to our new space, which is larger, we'll see that the paint is no longer constrained to the artboard, which was about here, and it is now over the border. That's okay, this is an easy fix.
We can go to our eraser tool and let's adjust it to a large size so that we can begin erasing. Next, we need to see which layer this green is within. If we look over to artboard 1 and look to the icon for blue layer, we'll see that the green is down there.
We'll highlight our blue layer and simply erase the green. Next, we want to stretch out this blue background so it fills the entire canvas. The way to do that is to highlight all three layers.
We'll hit CTRL T to transform them, and then we can simply drag out the size. We'll zoom out and drag it out again. I'll make sure that I've filled the entire artboard, and we can hit ENTER to solidify this change.
Next, we'll hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work, and we can begin cleaning up our layers. First, let's delete layer 1 and put it in the trash. Click yes.
Next, let's group all three of these layers into one group. We can drag it into the folder icon below, and let's retitle this group background. When we start adding many more layers here, it'll be important to keep things categorized and organized so that we can easily find them.
Our next step in this process is to bring in the logo, the phase 10 logo we've previously created. To do this, we'll want to add the logo into artboard 1. Let's go again to file, open, and this time we'll be opening up our phase 10 vector file containing the logo. We'll click open, and here we have our phase 10 logo that we'll want to add in to the phase 10 construction banner Photoshop file.
To do this, we'll highlight all five layers. We'll then simply click and drag them into phase 10 construction banner and release. Next, let's group all of these again into a new folder and title this folder logo.
And finally, let's save our work. As a last step in this video, let's take phase 10 construction text out from underneath the logo as we'll be putting it above in our title bar. We'll simply go into logo, highlight phase 10 construction, and drag it out so that it's below logo and background.
We'll see that it has now moved to the top, and we have the ability with the move tool found in the tools bar to click and drag it towards the top. Let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard, and in the next video we'll begin placing some of these elements in our banner appropriately to create the final work. See you there!