Montage design for music DVDs

rock-music-montage

I have been working on some CD and DVD packaging for a music creation software company. I love doing stuff to do with music and here I was asked to create some montages to express different musical genres. The montages will eventually go on large sierra boxes (a sierra box is a large cardboard box [...]

How to make PowerPoint presentations and Word documents look beautiful

word-pp-cs2

If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: “The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice”, what are you going to do? The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get creative! Here are a few tips [...]

How to create paper, receipts or newspaper with torn edges

receipt

I was asked by a client to present their final figures in a pitch they were doing in the form of a receipt. I thought it was quite a nice little Photoshop trick and a nice idea. Here’s how. Draw the outline of the receipt, or piece of paper, with the Pen Tool (P), and [...]

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

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Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N). Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are [...]

How to design a cool web 2.0 button in Illustrator and Photoshop

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An earlier tutorial on how to make a shiny button in Illustrator using the Opacity Mask feature can be improved upon greatly by adding a sexy brushed steel surrounding ring to your amber jelly button! As previously explained, the shiny “web 2.0″ button look can be made by placing a circle with a linear black-to-white [...]

How to turn a photo into an illustration

sunflower

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator’s old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button on the Control Palette offers [...]

Graphic design an eye

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This is one way of reproducing a striking image without having to pay for it! The logical way of doing an image made of dots would be like this: Make sure that your image’s width and height are divisible by 10 pixels (the above is 450 by 300 pixels). Nice round numbers make the following [...]

Designing photo montages in Photoshop

russia-putin

Although it’s important to cut out images well when composing a montage in Photoshop, it’s definitely not the most important thing. Images should be chosen for their ability to fit in with the other graphic elements in the composition. Usually one piece or element should stick out more than others – the “hero”. It is [...]

Graphic designer’s picture quiz #3 with hidden famous faces

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How many famous faces can you spot, who are they, what’s the background they’re superimposed on? I did this to illustrate an article I wrote commenting on the music industry. I used paths, marquees with a feather of two pixels and a brush eraser with a hardness of 0% to cut out the heads. It’s [...]

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