Learn how to design a postcard for a fictional company, Strategy Skyline, starting from creating a new file to adding a title bar. This article provides a step-by-step process, including resizing and arranging images, creating a background, adding a logo, and setting up a title bar.
Key Insights
- The postcard design begins with creating a new file with a width of 6 inches and a height of 4.25 inches at a 300 resolution since it will be printed. The file is saved as a Photoshop file named 'Strategy Skyline postcard.'
- The layout of the postcard includes a title banner with a city image in the background and a company logo placed at the bottom right. The city image is imported from an 'Austin Skyline Photoshop file,' transformed to fill the postcard, and converted to a 'smart object.'
- The next steps involve adding the title bar and company logo. Guides are added at specific measurements to ensure the correct placement of the title bar. The high-resolution logo, previously created, is resized and placed in a corner. The title 'Building the Future Skyline' is added within the title bar.
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For our next project, we're going to be designing a postcard for the fictional company Strategy Skyline, who also had us vectorize and recolor their logo in previous lessons. In this video, we'll begin the process of creating the postcard.
Let's start by creating a new file. For this file, we'll navigate over to print, and because we don't have a template option, we'll create our own details. First, let's rename this file after the company Strategy Skyline and add postcard.
Next, let's change our width to 6 inches and the height to 4.25 inches. In addition, we'll want to keep a 300 resolution as we will be printing this, and we'll click create. Next, we'll save our file, going to file, save as, and we'll save it as Strategy Skyline postcard as a Photoshop file, and we'll click save.
The first thing that we're going to do is look at the layout of our postcard. Essentially, what our client wants is a title banner with an image in the background of a city and their logo on the bottom right hand side of the screen. We have all the pieces to make this work, so let's begin importing.
We'll go to file, open, and let's open up our Austin Skyline Photoshop file and click open. We'll then take Austin Skyline and all of the masks and drag them over to our Strategy Skyline postcard and drop them here. In addition, let's right click and convert this to a smart object.
We can now rename this Austin Background and we can delete our previous background layer. Next, let's transform this so it fills the postcard but is not so zoomed in. We'll hit CTRL T and zoom out, and here we can simply resize it so that it fits the postcard.
As we can see, we'll need to stretch it out a little bit so that we fill it from top to bottom, and we'll get it mostly centered, and that looks pretty good. We'll hit ENTER and CTRL S to save and okay. The next thing we'll want to do is add the png of the logo we created earlier.
We can do this by going to file, place embedded, and then we'll select the high resolution logo white yellow png and click place. It's obviously a little big right now, so we can drag it down in size, and let's put it in the corner over here for now and click outside. We've now got the first parts of our postcard.
Next, let's add our title bar. Before doing this, we're going to want to remember to add guides. Let's scroll in and for our guides, let's add a guide 2 16ths of an inch below and 10 16ths of an inch below, or at 0.125 and 0.625, meaning that we'll have half inch title bar.
Next, let's create a new layer for our title bar. We'll go to new layer, let's rename it title bar, and with the rectangle tool, and we'll simply drag from one corner to the next, hit CTRL T to transform it, and I'll drag it to the corners, and hit ENTER. Let's change the color of our title bar by clicking the fill in properties, and let's use the eyedropper tool now from the color picker to choose this green.
Find something a little more green and click ok. We now have our title bar, our background image, and our logo. Let's hit CTRL S to save, and finally let's add a title here.
We'll use the horizontal type tool, and we're going to draw a bounding box from the left corner to the right, and here we'll type building the future skyline. Unfortunately mine's not showing up here, so I'll hit CTRL A to select all, and typically that means something's wrong with the font where it won't fit inside the bounding box. With it all selected with CTRL A, I'll go to my options and lower the font size to, we'll start at 12 points.
Here we go, we'll delete the filler text, and here we go, we have building the future skyline. Let's increase the size just a little bit to 16 points. Click outside and hit CTRL S to save, and now we have the start of our postcard.
We'll have some work to do stylizing it to make it look nice, but here we have the foundation for our postcard. In the next video, we'll continue working on this postcard. See you there!