Delve into the world of graphic design with this article, which provides a detailed walkthrough of making final adjustments to a banner design and preparing it for client export in Photoshop. Learn how to add stylistic elements to text and logo, apply filters to the background, and finalize your artwork with necessary metadata before exporting it.
Key Insights
- The article offers a step-by-step guide on enhancing text and logo elements in a banner design using Photoshop's feature set, including gradient overlays for text and drop shadows for logos to create depth and distinction.
- It illustrates how to apply filters to the background layer of a design for a more dynamic look and feel, demonstrating how to convert multiple layers into a single smart object for easy manipulation and filter application.
- The guide further explains how to prepare your artwork for export to a client, emphasizing the importance of filling out metadata such as the document title, author, and copyright status, and capturing a comprehensive screenshot of your work for submission.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll be making some final adjustments to our banner and then exporting it for our client. The first thing I'd like to do is add a little bit of style to our text up top.
It feels a little plain so we'll go down and click the fx icon and it'll give you the opportunity to choose whatever style you'd prefer for our text. I'm going to choose a gradient overlay and for the gradient we can specify this by clicking on our gradient. I'm going to choose one of the standard gradients and click ok.
Simply adjust it. I like the different colors that this has here. We can scale it up or down and in this instance I'm going to scale it way up.
I'll drop the opacity a little bit so it's not quite as obvious and click ok. As we can see it starts to fade a little bit darker however as mentioned choose your own style for your title. Next let's add a little bit of styling to our logo.
Currently it feels a little flat within the image so let's give it a little bit of an ability to distinguish itself from the background. We'll go and click the fx icon and let's add a drop shadow. A drop shadow essentially adds a shadow to our image distinguishing it and almost giving it the look of being raised above the background.
Let's go through how we can do this. The first thing we'll want to do is change our distance from three and as we drag up we can see the shadow forming. We'll leave our shadow at about 33 pixels and we can next distinguish the spread or how much our shadow drop shadow is spread out.
Leave it at 17 and finally we can adjust the size. I'll increase the size to about 30 to 40 pixels because it'll spread out evenly there and next let's set our angle. As we drag our angle around we can see that we have a shadow in each of these different corners.
We can also see from the preview on the right that it'll show where the shadow is. The angle of about 130 however I think the distance is a little far out right now. Let's bring the distance little more to about nine pixels.
We can adjust our spread and the size and hit okay. We can then toggle our logo visibility effect to see what it looks like without the drop shadow and I think that adds a little more depth bringing our attention to our phase 10 logo. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and finally let's add a style change to our background.
We'll select the background and next we're going to want to convert the textured corners green layer and blue layer all to one smart object. We can right click on this and click convert to smart object so that we can work with one layer for our styling. Let's rename this background and hit ENTER.
Next we'll go up to our filter and select the filter gallery and first let's change the view to fit on screen. As we can see since the filters aren't limited to the artboard it's going to show us our entire layer and some of the edges that aren't contained in the artboard. So let's zoom in just a little bit and drag our view to the left so that we can see mostly what we'll see in the artboard.
As we can see on the right there are many different filters and as we click on each of them we'll see that photoshop will produce the effect within our view. We can go through a couple different options and observe the differences and changes that each of these makes for our image. In addition we can also make adjustments depending on the different styles on the right hand side.
For example with patchwork selected we can go to the right and we can adjust our square size. Currently we have pretty small squares so if we adjust it higher and change it to 10 we'll see that the squares become a little bit larger. In addition we can adjust our relief or in between the squares to be larger or smaller as well.
Feel free to choose whatever style and make whatever adjustments you'd prefer for your banner and for me I'll choose stained glass. I'm going to increase the cell size a bit and the border thickness I'm going to reduce and finally for light intensity I'm going to raise it up just a little bit so it's a little lighter where the p will be. I'll click ok and we'll see the effect in the background.
Let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and finally we're ready to export. In this case our client has specified that we export this as a photoshop file so that they can make necessary tweaks and adjustments if needed. However they do want us to fill out some of the metadata so to do this we'll go to file and go to file info to change our metadata.
Here they've requested we fill out the document title author as well as the copyright status. We'll type in phase 10 construction banner for author you can put your name for the author title we'll type in photoshop student. For our description we'll type phase 10 construction banner for event.
Next for our copyright let's change this to copyrighted and we'll type in Finally we'll click ok and finally we can save our work hitting CTRL S on our keyboard. Next let's prepare our file for our screenshot. In order to do so let's go to our layers panel and we'll want to make sure that all of our layer groups are expanded so we can see all of our elements.
In addition in this case we're going to drag our layers panel up a bit so that we can clearly see all of them. We'll have our title bar as a group with our text and a gradient overlay our bar and then within our logo we'll have a logo and a drop shadow and finally within our background we'll have our background layer with a filter from our filter gallery. From here we're going to be selecting our board 1 as our selection so that we can see the width as 72 inches and the height as 48 inches.
In addition we're going to want to make sure that our guides are shown by selecting artboard 1 and with all of these layers shown and expanded as well as our properties for our artboard selected and our guide shown we're now ready to screenshot. On a windows computer we'll be hitting the windows key on our keyboard and print screen and this will take a screenshot saved to our pictures folder. In addition remember that on a mac you'll use command shift 4 on the keyboard to drag a selection box which will save as a screenshot to your desktop.
Please crop these images so that it shows the entire interface and with that screenshot saved please upload it to the portal as part of your final grade. By uploading this screenshot it's not necessary to upload the photoshop file itself as you will be graded on the screenshot alone. Again we'll want to make sure that all of our layers are expanded within the screenshot our guides are shown and our properties for our artboard are shown as well and please upload that screenshot.
In the next video we'll be working on our strategy skyline postcard. See you there!