Freelance Graphic Designer London

Simple design idea for corporate marketing

I was asked to come up with a visual to portray a corporate bank’s image. This was one of the largest banks in the world, one that prided itself on coming up with intelligent solutions and, whilst it wanted to evoke reliability and gravity, it also wanted to be known as innovative.

The tag line for the campaign had already been decided upon: “Expert in ideas”. Great, I thought, my mind clouded with Photoshop filters and Illustrator effects. I got to work…

Half way through I got bored of the extravagant imagery and vibrant colours and I suddenly realised that I had got something really good! I also realised that what I had served as a metaphor for my experiencein design and marketing which could be distilled down to two rules.

1. Keep it simple! Easy to say, not so easy to convince people to do.
2. Give them something they need to take a second look at. For example, a neat typographical trick like the one above; “expert in” is in “ideas”. Get it?

I wish I could use this as a tag line for my business. This is what I should be – an expert in ideas – if I want to be successful in this field.

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Changing an image to match your design’s colours

You have a great photo. You have a great design. One problem: the photo doesn’t “go” with the design.

The solution is to change the image in Photoshop to more accurately match the colour scheme of the design or, more commonly, to match the client’s or brand’s colours.

In the above example the final image (on the left) was changed from the original image (on the right) to reflect my client’s corporate colours.

There are many different ways of doing this in Photoshop. For the different segments of the umbrella I cut around them using the Pen Tool (P) and, after feathering the resulting selection slightly to get rid of hard edges, I filled a layer with the red or the orange and set the layer’s blend mode to Color Burn. Linear Burn also works, as does Color. Play around with the layer blend modes.

However for the dress I used a different technique. After isolating the dress in the same way, by making a path with the Pen Tool and featuring the path’s selection (Select > Modify > Feather… (CS3); Select > Feather (before CS3!)) by 2 or 3 pixels, I changed the colour slightly using Hue/Saturation. Go Image > Modify > Hue/Saturation… (cmd/ctrl-U) and move the Hue slider.

To get the client’s or brand’s corporate colour, read the RGB or CMYK values by hovering over them in Photoshop whilst looking at the Info palette and see if you can emulate those values on the part of the image that you are trying to colour. Do this in order to get an accurate colour match.

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How to design psychedelic pop art

I made this image of one of my favourite guitarists, Jimi Hendrix. He is associated with flamboyant clothing and psychedelic colourful artwork on his album covers and guitars so I tried to make this image as vibrant as possible.

To do this I followed the basic techniques of pop art that I’ve used before. Only this time instead of underlaying the image with flat Warhol-esque colours, I put in various colour gradients on different layers.

This was achieved by getting a new blank layer (clicking on “Create a new layer” icon in the Layers palette, or cmd/ctrl-opt-shift-N) filling it with a gradient of the colour spectrum (select the Gradient Tool (G) and in the Info palette select one of the two spectrums available, to apply the gradient simply drag the Gradient Tool across the image). This can be done repeatedly on different layers. I set the layers’ blending modes so that the colours on all of the layers can be seen and merge together in a complimentary way so that the result is kaleidoscopic. The blending mode I found most useful for this was Difference, but I also used Linear Burn and Soft Light.

I also used three different greyscale layers of the man himself of differing opacities. Multiply, Screen and Pin Light were the layers’ blending modes used here but Multiply is usually the most effective for the black in pop art. One or two of these layers were blurred.

Importantly, this effect can be used to resample a tiny web pic up to a large high resolution print ready image with no loss of quality!

You can download the low resolution PSD here. jimi-hendrix-psychedelic-pop-art.psd 4.6MB

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Forum design for music website

I have just created a phpBB bulletin board or forum for my music website. Click here to visit the mu-sik forum.

I installed it using Fantastico which I have on my host’s cPanel. I chose the prosilver phpBB theme which was close to the look I was trying to achieve. This meant tweaking a few of the HTML template pages and uploading a new header image.

Similar to WordPress, phpBB is an open source CMS written in PHP programming language and backed by a MySQL database. In English, this means that it’s free and it runs websites.

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Environmentally-friendly designing and marketing during a recession

I’ve noticed a trend emerge recently. A client of mine got me to design an invitation to a marketing event – cocktails at a new store – I sent him a beautifully designed invite in the form or a PDF and asked him how many he needed printed and he said: “Oh, there’s no need, I’m sending the PDF by email”.

More and more of this will be happening in the future. If this widely-predicted recession actually takes hold, marketing managers can tighten there budgets by sacrificing digital print for digital communication.

It’s another benefit of the interactive PDF. Why go to the expense of printing something when you can email a PDF? They look good, the file size is low enough not to bother the receiver and, let’s face it, it’s more likely to be seen than if it was sent in the post.

There are various other ways of side-stepping a printer. There’s html emails, although care should be taken that they’re not seen as spam. And there’s one-off web pages – if you’re very worried about spam filters simply put a link in your email. A new domain can be set up in seconds for next to nothing. Simply create a site at www dot something-interesting-that-hasn’t-been-thought-of-yet dot com and design an eye-catching splash page. Use web stats and forms to see if visitors have landed.

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Posted in Design, Marketing | 8 Comments »

How to distress or shatter type in Illustrator

This is a good tip if you ever want to change type to invoke a mood. I wanted to give a bit of text a feeling of electricity and this is what I did.

First of all, in Illustrator, you must convert your type to outlines. Remember, after you have done this you can’t edit what’s written, so you better make sure you have spelled it correctly! To do this go Type > Create Outlines with it selected, or Cmd/ctrl-shift-O. Easy!

Next you need to draw diagonal lines across the text. Draw your first one at the top either with the Line Segment Tool(\) or the Pen Tool (P) and then, with the Selection Tool (V) and option held down, drag the whole line down to create your second line. Further lines can be draw with equal space in between by going Object > Transform > Transform Again, or Cmd/ctrl-D. (You may want to make you diagonal lines uneven for a more distressed effect, I just showed you this way because Illustrator’s Transform Again feature is incredibly cool!)

Now the clever part. With everything selected, type outlines and diagonal lines, click Divide in the Pathfinder palette.

Now, with the Direct Selection Tool (A), move the sections around until you’ve created something you’re happy with.

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Using Photoshop channels to create cool montages

A client of mine was illustrating an article about the World Economic Forum whose annual meeting is usually held in scenic Davos in Switzerland. My client was keen to stress the importance of interconnectivity within both the forum and the wider business community and gave me an image of connected wires of light to marry with the snowy village shot.

To cut out the sky of this pic I adjusted one of the RGB channels. This is a specially useful technique if the area you want to cut out is clearly differentiated by the tones in the picture already – like a figure shot against a white background for example. In these situations you already have a bit of information there that can do the job for you.

Have a look at the channels and select the one which is closest to the black and white mask you want to create – it’s usually the blue channel in RGB. Copy this channel by dragging it to the ‘Create a new channel’ icon at the bottom of the Channels palette. Firstly, create a stark channel of just white and black with no greys. One way to do this is to go Image > Adjust > Threshold… but you may want to use Curves…

This will never be enough to create the cut-out mask in itself but it should be possible to create a channel that closely fits the outline you want. It’ll then be necessary to select the Brush Tool (B) to fill in the areas of white or black as desired. Black hides; white reveals.

When you are happy with the channel, simply cmd/ctrl-click on the channel in the Channels palette go to the appropriate layer in the Layers palette and click the “Add layer mask” icon at the bottom of the palette (it looks like a washing machine). The channel copy will be applied to the layer as a mask.

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How to design a 3d box or cube in Photoshop

I created this image to represent the idea of “Energy in a Box”.

The secret of making a box in Photoshop is to use guides and enabling the Snap to Guides feature to make sure everything looks as it should do.

I started with selecting a 2d side (or sides) for the box. I chose a sun image to represent energy. I added some Inner Glow around the edges and saved the document. I then created a slightly larger Photoshop file and proceeded to set my guides (see below).

Paste the 2d shape into the file and use the Free Transform tool (Cmd/Ctrl-T) and, holding down Cmd or Ctrl, drag the corners of the 2d shape to the correct point where the guides intersect.

You may decide to darken some areas of the cube to increase the 3d effect.

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