Saturday, April 30, 2011

Bulletin Cover

I've decided to tilt the direction of this blog into a digital portfolio of my current and previous works as a designer.

For starters, I'm going to share a guide about how I made this bulletin cover for a Videogame community. I'm sorry because I will not be very thorough, and you'll need to have some basic photoshop knowledge to understand half of what I'm saying.

For this cover I used Photoshop CS5.
The dimensions for this were half a standard letter size (1275x1650)

I started with a black background and the map of Unova.
Rotated it a bit and set opacity on 55%.

At this point I was trying to figure what would be the most recurring theme in the Black & White ads, and decided to go with pattern of black and white rectangles. I looked for an image with these patterns, zoomed an area where I could get some clear squares and set the pattern. To do so, after you get a clear area, select four rectangles (more than that is not necessary) with the square marquee tool, go to Edit > Define Pattern, set the name and click ok.

Notice the 3200% zoom.

Then, to use your new pattern the way I did, you first select the area to fill with the marquee tool, select Edit > Fill (you can press shift + F5), use Patterns, on custom pattern, click on the arrow on the right and scroll down until you find the new pattern.

After I did this with black and white rectangles, each one in different layers, I did a diagonal selection in the middle, feathered to 100 pixels and erased the unnecessary parts.
Then I set the black rectangles mode in Overlay and the white ones in Linear light, so it had a little transparency and the Unova background was still visible. I know you're probably not following what I'm saying at this point, but bear with me.

At this point, it looked like this:


The next part was probably the most fun and defining.
As you know, I used Zekrom and Reshiram, which was the obvious choice. After I got my hands around some hi-res artwork, I resized them and positioned them. Since they´re supposed to be the main impact of the cover, I set a glow for each one. As for the colors, I used the eyedropper to get the blue of Zekrom´s reflection and the pink on Reshiram´s; then I used them to make an outer glow with these values:

The Linear Light mode gives a good glow-like vibe, but the opacity was lowered because I didn't want it to be so bright.

The next thing was to add a subtle but interesting "shadow" in the lower part. For this, I used both Zekrom´s and Rehiram´s silhouette, copied the layers, merged them, set the color overlay to black in the blending options, skewed it (Edit>Transform>Skew) so it would look like a shadow cast on the floor and added some Gaussian blur.

At this point, I was past the "hard" part and the rest consisted in adding the editorial stuff.
Added the Pokemon logo and Black & White logos, the banner in the left, which states publishing number and disclaimers, as well as the "Proyecto Reset" logo (that I also designed) with a little customization to fit with the whole theme.


In some other entries I will upload the full magazines (even though it´s in spanish) and some other quick guides explaining how I make them.

I´m also unemployed right now, so If you have something in mind, feel free to discuss.

35 comments:

  1. sick! good choice of pictures to use!

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  2. Good stuff. I've been meaning to learn more about Photoshop.

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  3. Nice work, I dunno a thing about photoshop xD

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  4. Oh great, i try but im not good in photoshop

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  5. I tried to get into photoshop once a couple years ago, but i failed horribly. Interesting article, will be followin' :>

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  6. Gotta love pokemon :D However, black and white sucks because there's no magicarp to catch!

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  7. Really nice work. And nice topic, too - loves me some Pokemon.

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  8. great work, im a bit of a photoshop nerd myself

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  9. i am under employed, working at a job that i am on-call i would almost rather be unemployed then deal with calls at all hours telling me the need to for 3 hours and to be there in 30 min. when its a hour drive.

    off topic i know

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  10. nice work, very well put together

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  11. Saving this! I will be able to use this very, very soon!

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  12. amazing work. very nice, i'd like to do it too.

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  13. Keep this type of content comming, I'n very interested.

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  14. Very good work bro, keep it up!

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  15. Nice little trick with the rectangles :)

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  16. Just beat white yesterday, great game, needs more magicarp XD

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  17. that is a sweet looking cover. good luck job hunting

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  18. Not bad, but if you want criticism, you could definitely have done a better job on the cutout of the Pokemon logo. You can still see the white around it and the "tm" looks bad. Anyway, I'll be following you, curious of what you'll have to show!

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  19. @tomatoshadow
    Thanks, for being the first one to critique.
    I wasn't able to find a good sized PNG of the pokemon logo with a transparent background, so I had to go with a regular white-background jpg. It's true that I could've done better, now that you mention it. I guess I got lazy.
    Thanks for noticing.

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  20. I guess this is another thing I will have to learn how to do, right after I figure out Sony Vegas. Ha ha.

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  21. wow thats actually really good! you should start doing custom's for people, sounds like a good idea :)

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  22. Pokemon are so old, cant believe there still around, good times lmao

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  23. Good job (and Pokémon B/W are fun lol), will follow for more.

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  24. great work, also will follow for more

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  25. Always wished to be able to use photoshop more like that, you are very good!

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  26. It's shopped, I can tell by the pixels.

    Seriously though, looks good to me, though I'm barely an amateur at graphic design.

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  27. I'm terrible at photoshop..

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  28. Very effective application of color contrast in the background with the foreground images. Not overly done, which is good. I love how the tips of the 'S' stretch across the 'RESET' text. Gives it a more dynamic feel. Maybe the only thing I'd suggest is to lighten the darker text in the title. Maybe some sort of outline? It just seems a shade too dark for my eyes.

    Other than that, you have a really professional cover. Keep up the great work. :D

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