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The Creative Process

Lesson 3 from: Graphic Design Essentials

Jack Davis

The Creative Process

Lesson 3 from: Graphic Design Essentials

Jack Davis

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Lesson Info

3. The Creative Process

Lesson Info

The Creative Process

I mentioned that. Really? What we what you do when starting anything is first is finding out about the audience, um, the first client, the product, the service and then the audience that they're trying to sell to. So unless you know that you really can't. If you all you need did know was about the company product service, you'd still be stuck because you would be thinking about what you would communicate to yourself. And you may not be the target audience, age, gender, ethnicity, location, locale, whatever. So, um, financial background, all those things or something to keep in mind in terms of what can you say in the most potent way for the audience that you're concerned about? It also is a good reminder that sometimes your audience isn't what you think it is. And that's where companies that have the luxury of actually doing market research to find out who is the audience to track. Who is clicking on the website who is doing all this could be invaluable. Oftentimes you may not have tha...

t luxury, but if you do have that resource, you know, if you are in the graphic design industry or are getting into it, Theo, quote unquote beginner that this week is kind of focusing on. I would highly recommend you taking advantage of getting even. If you are already established in your own smaller studio. Think about working in a larger one just so you have some experience with that sort of environment, go back to your own independent when you're done. But if you can work with some other studios, so you just get that aspect of market research as part of the equation, it's invaluable. It really changes things and, of course, the benefit of working in a creative group where somebody's gonna tell you what, okay, on your concept, I remember one of my best stories at Art Center was taking this class with the best creative directors in Los Angeles in terms of advertising agencies. And Lee Cloud, who I mentioned before was one of them, and it was the assignment with him, and we were given this assignment to do an ad for X. Y Z and I had were all post up our coms, which we're gonna talk on right now, But I'll put up on the wall and he's critiquing everybody. The leak lower that the has already mentioned in my God. And he looks at my and he goes, That's nice. Was your first idea wasn't? Yeah. You should have crumple it up and thrown it in the trash. Okay, that was the easiest solution you could have come up with. That is, there was nothing unique. There was nothing innovative about that. That was easy. That was a no brainer. You took no risks. You took no challenges. It was such an emotional thing. It was the of course, in front of all your colleagues and everything else ripped a complete new one. And it was the best piece of education I ever received with someone being that frank to say, Dude, you know, step up. Because that was not worthy of me. It wasn't worthy of arts center. It wasn't worthy of the company product or service. So that's the one of the problems when you're in and when you're in, you're going cubbyhole, doing your own design. You're attempted because the deadlines and Bunches everything else to do that first right answer. And that is often not the case. Sometimes you come back to it. But that's why I say if you have the opportunity of work in the current environment, where people can be honest and say, you know, whatever this brain strumming that we're going to talk touch on right now is invaluable. So with that, um, one of the projects I worked on a number of years ago, as you'll see by the date, was to design the posters and graphics promotional for the Virgin Islands competition or their entry into the America's Cup race. Okay, yacht racing down in same time, specifically the American USB I My parents used to have a bed and breakfast down there. So anyway, so that's the thing. So you have the yacht race. It's his classic old yacht race from, you know, it's been going on forever. So the first thing and I'm gonna bring up my little comp here, and this is something actually did this morning. We're gonna have a white board this morning, and I was actually gonna do him this morning. But we decided that I'm too tall for the lighting in here, so I thought so. I did some quick sketches, which, by the way, I did on my IPad and if you are, should be doing it. These sketches, which looks like a pencil sketches actually using paper from the company. 53. It's an awesome app. It's amazing. It's fantastic. You could do final graphics, and it has the Bresch best brush for doing beautiful calligraphy that you'll ever get awesome. There's a number of really good APS, and I also use Photoshopped touch. Okay, Photo shop has a complete application now with layers, styles, filters that's compatible via the cloud with the regular photo shop. So you can do there, including working with type and stuff for sketching. I like this one. The pencil in a paper from 53 is a great one, but anyway, so in a really simplified fashion, I would have showed you hundreds of thumbnails a za part of this initial project that I did for the Virgin Islands. But we'll just start off with this one. And the first thing is this brainstorm of coming up with, um, possible ideas once you've interviewed the client. So I'm talking with a client getting a feel for won the America's Cup race and to the unique thing about them. Is the Virgin Islands in relationship to that? Obviously, This is a huge tourist attraction For this time of year. This was all in the year 2000. It was gonna be 99. It was delayed until the year 2000. So it's the Millennium race Virgin Islands Air doing yet they're trying to get, you know they want to sell 10 million T shirts is what they want to do because the race wasn't in the original. So, um, interviewing the client, finding everything about the America's Cup that I could the legacy of it, the classic nature of it, specifically the iconography of it, the actual cup itself and that heritage. So that's have that ingrained in my system. The second thing is the Virgin Islands itself. The tropics, the Caribbean, the colors, the palm trees, the water, just the whole thing related to the tropics. That is the unique aspect of them telling the America's Cup story. So in interviewing that, then you take all this information and I'd recommend the first step is taking that in doing a brain dump of words associated words. Okay, sometimes that's done in a grid where you do. In this case, I just put some out again. This morning when I compass up, Um, yacht cup race, Palm tropics water, sand color, classic etching New Deco. Some things that I'm going with that make that long list as long as possible. There's no wrong answers. You just get it out of your brain and onto paper so you can clear it. Because oftentimes, if you don't put things down on paper, there are still right around in your head. And it's hard for you because you're thinking on one item and it will stay there and you won't be able to move on to another one unless you get it off. So one thing that's done is you do the brain dump of words of the associations, and then you do the exact same set of words on a vertical. It's really gonna make a grid. So now you've got all these words associated with your company product or service event. You have the exact same words on the top Eudora grids on each one to the role in a column, and were they intersect? All of a sudden, you have etching and cup okay, you're automatically have just simply mathematically come up with exponentially greater number of potential concepts because you may have never thought of Palm tree and cup that the America's Cup is beautiful. Chrome silver silver cup has a palm tree reflected in it? I wouldn't have thought of that concept. I actually didn't think of that concept until just this second. When I think do that would have been a great one, right? Just close up real thing. It's just the cup. You see that? And then when you on your second glance, you see the palm tree in the sunset and maybe even the nice, you know, sale in the background. So things like that those little tricks to help it win. You know, whether you get writer's block or designers block or whatever. Something as simple as this grid of words associated words can be invaluable. Just there, right there. Reflection, Palm tree and good to go. Jack, how do you How would you recommend finding this inspiration if you're not actually in a tropical setting? Do you go to Google images, or how do you kind of derive your inspiration? Well, I would go there, yeah, especially if it's dropping. Figure a way. I It's a write off graphic designer is that everything is a write off. I don't sneeze if I can't write it off. So what do you do? And there's your best quote right there. You can read. Okay, um, but Google images during a Google on doing images and again there a number of acts that are specific for doing images. Dorsett's searches on IOS and Android devices. So they're ones that are specific to that. Um, that's probably the best way. The other thing is, that's the conceptual one of getting, you know, things associated with that, especially once you do a word search. You could certainly do that, cause once you have your words and then, of course, you could do an image search, and you could then do the same sort of thing. We do a grid of now images, and you're gonna going, you know, again, reflection in palm, you know, silver in palm. And now you come up with another way of just dating another idea. Um, the other thing is, once you've got a concept in that within this brings us to this point here of doing thumbnails based upon the ideas that come up with it, the close up of the chrome edge of the scrollwork on the trophy and the palm in it. Now it's to get that concept out in a thumbnail format. And literally, it's the same sort of thing where it's a brain dump. It's not meant to be, as you'll see right here, these these air too rough. Okay, because of the time I hope to do just a few more on a white board. All it needs to be is for you to be able to remember the concept that came to your mind. So if I wanted to, if I were to do this and this, actually, you know, do this. And now we're in a photo shop and I'm gonna come up here and we'll do a new layer, and we'll use our shortcut of commander control. Delete automatically fills with your background color option, or all delete is automatically feel with your foreground color. So new layer and those things shift delete on Macro PC is filled with everything in the world possible history, content aware, fill history, states everything. Shift delete is one of the best shortcuts you'll ever learn because your content aware for retouching patterns, those history States that we just talked about it a second ago. Black, white, foreground background, color pattern, all that stuff. So there's another had to throw in. The tip had been over five minutes without a tip. Um, so in terms of the rial one. So let's go over here to our brushes, and we could even use a brush. I saw that he was a new irritable tip, and I've got black in my foreground. So if I'm from working on a, um poster, um, that I want to, um is the primary goal. They were going for posters that could be used in the secondary purpose as a T shirt to one of these for put a shop five not even CS five, but for shop I, Bert Monroy and myself made a much of brushes for adobe. So if you ever see any really cool brushes Bert and Meat did those I think for five. So anyway, so, um, we'll do the equivalent of our little pencil sketch. So if if this is our, um, poster and it's the close up of the the actual trophy goes up and something like say is like this, it's got a weird neck on it, something like this. But I'm looking into this area right here. So I'm a close up on this kind of arching curve on it as it goes up into the lip in here. And this is where I'm seeing the palm tree. Okay, So in terms of my thumbnail, I just need the thumbnail to be enough to go. Okay. The palm tree is going in here, okay? And often the distance in a shallow depth of field. Meaning this is blurred out. I'm shooting photographers here. I'm shooting it F 28 You know, I've got a macro lens on this thing and off in the distance. And of course, this is a sunset I'm seeing completely out of focus the sails on the horizon line. Okay? And because it's completely out of focus, focus. I know I can manufacture this in photo shop. In fact, this entire thing I could manufacture and photo shop because I know with image warp, I can wrap my own palm trees around it. I know I can get a close up of just a silver trophy, and I know I can throw that background back there, so I've got all the elements. I'm not gonna create something I can't do on time on budget. That's also something to keep in the back of your mind. If you're on time on budget like, Oh, this is great. I'm gonna set this up, but I'm gonna shoot this, and I'm gonna have 1200 assistance, and I'm gonna fly down. Probably gonna happen. Okay, So you're always designing within that, you know, constraint as well. So that right there is all that I need for a thumbnail. And the whole reason for that is, um, just to get the brain dump out. So it's Aiken, take my mind and go to a different place. Go to another happy place in my mind Because I've got it out of my mind So that the idea here is that communicated to me. You have no idea what that is Not what if I didn't explain that to you? Go. I don't have a clue what you're talking about for me. I get I get the size of the trophy. I get the palm tree. It got it out of my mind. And it's for me only I don't have nobody else has toe. See if this is a visual potential solution to my visual communication challenge. Remember to use big words like that with clients. So they shut up, right? Well, you know, and always threatened to say, Well, it's gonna take a lot longer if I need to explain stuff to you, Mr. So that it will be a hourly charge. OK, so that is that. So let's go back to this right here. And this is again. Normally, I would do pages and pages and pages of that. I have two incredibly artistic Children that are amazing. My son just graduated going off to college, part major breath, and, uh and my daughter is equally as talented, and they hated when I tell them you can't do anything without thumbnails, don't even and certainly don't bring it to me because I don't You don't know whether you've got the right solution until you've tried a bunch of those things. Um, I just know it. I know that you haven't because you're gonna be tempted The same thing that I did in that class at Art Center Do the first right answer. I would have never I'd never came up with that solution until just this second about the palm trees reflected in the silver thing with the background and then the out of focus sales in the background is also something that I just came up as I continue to do it with the thumbnail, you know? So you're constantly going back to your question about in terms of inspiration. So you've got the words. The other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highly recommend that you look at award annuals. In other words, look at people who have whose graphic design work is amazing, and the best source for that probably is the communication arts design. Annuals see a award. Annuals go into a used bookstore, eBay used books or whatever by every single see a design award annual you can get your hands on. They are gold because the history of modern graphic design is in those things of a person wins a C award, and there in that book they're fantastic. And it's not to steal the ideas per se, but just is this. If you go something and I see what you'll see in those awards or whatever, as you're going to see that thing of a shape, you know, I was zoomed in on the war on the trophy, that upper in the lower right hand corner, this curve and something like that. I may be inspired by a skiing ad done in the Deco ages, but it had the similar composition, the line form, balance, color tones. Something about it inspired me. I'm gonna do something completely different. I needed something just to trigger my mind, my juices, my thoughts in terms of this could be use of type that the way they stacked and they go, Yeah, that's great. You're not stealing anything by seeing type composition of former color, you know, that's all. Fair game, okay? Don't steal someone's designed their solution and just repurpose it for years. That's not what I'm talking about, but stimulating the thought. So as you're making these, if you have the award annual down and especially if you're working at this size than your solutions, by definition are gonna be a complete steel, right? You're going to be doing this basic composition just like that one that I just did you know, here that feel free to steal that. Okay, if you'd like that right there. If you want to use that for your own solution, you go right ahead. Okay, So pages and pages and pages offended thumbnails. Do 50 thumbnails before you do anything else, Okay? A combination of both the words and images. If it's a Google image search or an award annual, I would do an award annual before because it's just so much deeper and richer or graphic design books. You know, there are a ton of books out there on things like that. Big picture books, no words, just pretty pictures, right? That's what you want. And then what you're gonna dio is then start comping up the ones that you think are useful So you can come up here, do this and do your type work. Come over here and then you're going to and you're gonna say, OK, that one I love. And that one that one. That one. And those are the ones you're gonna comp up and take them to a level so you can actually determine whether they do solve the visual communication challenge. So now you're going to refine it. One more step, you go. I don't have time for this. No, you don't have time to not do this. Because if not, if you go all the way down the production process and you go, well, it's kind of lame, right? Or is do what a lot of people do. They immediately go right into production. They start out for the size they have, they put their type. They do, you know, and they start producing the peace, hoping that, you know, some inspiration will hit before Ah, they're done. And so that's not what I'm talking about. Okay, so this may be the next step to rough it up enough so you actually can get all the elements associated with it. So this is three that I came up with that I that I actually did in here. So I take those super rough ones that nobody in the world can dio still, these air Pretty much you guys probably can't do. But we've got our trophy here. We've got, um, you know, America's Cup challenge in the date or something like that. And excuse me, I'm using a little parchment ribbons on this one, and I know that I've got palm trees, you know, in here that I've got the that I've got the palm trees. I'm tryingto as you hit space bar. We're in that bridge again. Space bar. Full size click takes you to 100% click and drag lets you reposition it again. We're back in the bridge and I like looking at images. Enbridge. It's just, you know, even though I'm a light room user, I don't have to create catalogs or bring things in. You just look in a folder and the fact that you can, you know, scale and do all that stuff. I just I still use bridge for that sort of thing. So I've got the cup. I've got the sales in here. I've got a little parchment arch. I'm going with the kind of an old etching seal is what was in my mind. Next, I've got something I'm thinking of more modern. The whole idea is what's unique about the America's Cup is the creation of these ships. Okay, that the yachts, the sailing vessels are all uniquely designed and super high tech, as you probably remember from the Dennis Conner's and all the stuff that goes into it. So this is basically going to be a blueprint where the cup itself is being designed. I don't have any information. Or can I show the boat? That was gonna be the entry from the Virgin Islands. But I can give the idea of blueprint in both the cup itself and then the typography. I'm actually going to construct the alphabet from scratch of that, leaving behind the elements that used it to do that to do the type This one. I also knew that I wanted to use the colors almost a reggae kind of coloring to it to talk about the Caribbean. So this is gonna be a combination of new technology, draftsmanship and color. This is old etching this. The concept on this one here was kind of It was an art Deco. I love art Deco the whole mechanical age, the twenties to the forties. So this is using something very graphic where the sales themselves or graphic shapes and elements on it just stacking the type using really simplified, almost airbrush coloring, which is what it was done it then. So this airbrush they used layering using halos and I just I love it. So there I can kind of see my stories flushed out. I'm starting to figure out actually where something will be and what will be and how it will go. These are, then the next step. Once you've got that and whether you show this to I wouldn't never show this to a client. This is they don't expect them to be able to visualize where you bring in somebody else in the studio, not the spouse. Um, we know what they're gonna do. No, Um my wife is a graphic designer as well, and she would be excellent at giving input, but, uh, this is, you know, for you and figuring out whether it's a solution. These are the cops done in light room for those three. So these are the things that I am and did show to the client for the solution. So I have the America's Cup. I have some old time yachts. These are the original vessels were used in it. America's cop. I've got my old etchings. So this is it? Well, enough of that. A little Popsicle tropical palm tree situation. So there's my first solution. I've taken it up. It's not final production on it, but it's close enough. And that's the great thing with photo shop is just using layers and layer masks and will play around more with that. This is the actual illustrator file. This is ah, done in illustrator again illustrator. We have really gone into that whole lot. But illustrator, because it is vector based, its shape based its tools. It's like a good old fashioned drafting table, which, of course, nobody remembers what a drafting table with. Just like they still think that film is that thing. If you don't brush your teeth but a drafting table and using all these things, which is this kind of going back to as well as having a modern feel is what I was going for here kind of abstract. Obviously, this isn't, you know, a detailed one of the trophy, but enough to give the field. So we're we've got the color going on. We've got the vector because this has done an illustrator. That's actually the nice thing about illustrator. Is that this? If they wanted this to be the size of Montana, it could blow up. It would be razor sharp. Okay? Supposed to if I had done this in a photo shop, not taking advantage of the shape, tools and Photoshopped. It would be limited to the resolution of whatever I designed it, that it would be a pixel grid and it would have a very set side. So that's again keep in the back of your mind if you're doing something that has the potential of being used, it any kind of size, by all means do everything you possibly can. And illustrator Not in Photoshopped. Okay. And last, this is the comp for the Art Deco solution. And this, as I mentioned, is kind of going for an airbrushed look. And here we've got the same colors. We've got the translucency of the of the water and this is a classic motif the wave motif used in you know, Art Deco period for posters is so I'm stealing all of that. We have the colors of the Virgin Islands. So this was the last situation here and trying to find in each one of these three fonts that are complementing what I'm going for old time, something more modern but still very, very classic in terms of a Sarah Funt and this with a more modern won't, even though with a throwback to the deco. This what we went with this ended up being the final production on it. But that was on Lee done. And then this one, actually l love find you the layered file, which I have in here. Um, this was then taken in fine tuned into a final production piece that could be used for the production of T shirts, the posters and everything else. Okay, so that is with the design process that I would do First, you're going to conceive in thumbnail format and rough word association taking that to tighten it up so you can see whether it is a solution to your challenge. Comp it up enough to show the client again. That's up to you that people are showing less to the client. And that's probably smart these days. Just because clients in the olden days they would know when a person saw this that the heck of a lot of work went into it. And clients now think that everything is automatic, everything is a filter. Nobody's doing anything and that it's like photography. It's been it's degraded the industry because people think so less of it because they think it's been so automated when really it hasn't the conceptual aspect of it. That's why we're spending all the time talking about concept. And coming up with the unique selling point is, and using the big words is your coming back to your client and proving to them that this is all about storytelling. And it's not about just making something pretty. Okay, so anyway, OK, so there is the press about that. Any questions from our local students? Or which is have a couple of questions about the tools that you're using? So could you again tell us about your tablet and the stylists? And what those exactly are? I'm using a Mac book pro, which is awesome, which should be refreshed really soon. The Apple Developer conference In a few days. Yes, I'm using a welcome into us for the latest and greatest from welcome. It's indispensable. It's awesome. It's got a new set of control panels, which I turn off while I'm teaching just because it as I roll over it, it will do a heads up display. I still use a mouse that's almost hard to find a walking with the mouse nowadays because as a graphic designer you do so much precision work, sometimes resting it and being able to do a click, click, click busy A Curve Assn. Ices! This is for anything Free her. And this this is essential. This is fantastic. If you were to do you know, these are paintings? Okay, that I've done in Photoshopped. Um, and there's no way that you're gonna get any kind of expression on that without this. So, you know, this is soap on a rope. This actually will translate your personality. Those were really the only things that I have here. I also a zai mentioned a use and IPad as a great sketch and generator. The nice thing about that is because since you can pull things off the web right into something like Photoshopped touch, it's great for concept ing conceiving and doing stuff like that. Especially in that with the creative cloud. Since when you have the creative cloud, you can immediately have this unified location for anything that you do on a mobile device or whatever. Um, I other tools, those in the main ones, you'll notice that I don't use if you do understand things like layer styles. Um, and how blend modes, work and how light room and adobe camera work. I've used very few third party filters, even though there's some excellent companies out there. If you understand how Photoshopped works a lot of time, those third party filters are simply an interface put onto a layer style or something is built into Photoshopped doesn't take away from how fantastic and how fast those things can be. But if you understand how Photoshopped works, I don't find that I use the third party one. So that's not those, Aren't, you know, major things for me that's called Unnecessary Zoom. That's beautiful. Do you have any questions from the in studio audience? Come, Yes, pretty. I was just noticing a lot of your images. At least you're showing us right here. Very colorful, although now I see when there s so I was wondering if you did some. Yeah, like black and white line drawings for your clients as well Or is everything kind of from the past? Now, um, I I do do a lot of color. I just I just you know, but I love black and white. Obviously these some of these photographs Is he here or I love infrared photography because the beautiful CPR, pallets and muted tones you get some of them things like this to, you know, make something retro, you know, use a more muted palette. So, um, so specific was your question in terms off the line drawings that sometimes people want so they can have their black and white image if they don't want to print something in color? Yeah, and now used. There actually are some great techniques in photo shop, too, Um, automatically convert a photograph into a line drawing. As a matter of fact, I believe my line drawing action is part of the set. If you buy the disk, I know it's part of my one click while the 900 sets available it. While creative arts dot com thank you for the plug. My cousin here is bugging me so I can eso. But there are different techniques and photo shop to do a very nice line drawing. There's also a lot of mobile APS for things like the IPhone and that they're doing some really great stuff. It's nice to get any time that you can turn something that's representational into something symbolic. It takes it to a different level from a photographer standpoint, Any time that you can do, you know, hand tinting technique. It also shows that you that an artist was in the process as opposed to everybody thinking that you just press the shutter and everything is fantastic. So whether it's a sketch of it, this is a poster from a photograph that I did for Santa Cruz. So this was just a small little throwaway shot. I wanted it to be the symbol of this incredible statue at Santa Cruz. I didn't want it to be representational. So whether it's a sketch or a painting, I think that, you know, here's another painting. So these were all done in Photoshop using the new mixer brush technology, which I am some of you out there? No. Yes, I am still working on finishing that painting title. Um, and hopefully it will be out soon. And this I'll just show you that one, because this is a favorite. When I was commissioned to do the portrait of Princess Di for the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and this is again is a photo shop painting. So I think especially paintings are wonderful for a photographer to have as part of their bag of tricks just because it does immediately shut the client up when they're looking at it and going okay. My daughter couldn't do that. My sons, cousins uncle, who does, you know, you know, snap Seed didn't do it. It's something that set apart as a unique story about this company of product or service. So whether it's a painting or an illustration or sketch, I think it's invaluable. And I'll see at lunch if I can pull up that sketch action that I'm giving to you all. Yeah, things like high key and light women stuff like that. High key or hand tending all those things you can do right in adobe camera, raw or like. And they're fantastic. Okay, Okay. How do we need to do another tip? Um, real quick. So? So this is a logo that I did for a coffeehouse. Caffeine cubed is as pronounced, um, toe, You know, the combination of energy drink plugged in, you know, atomic energy, the gear, all these things are the solution to the challenge of how do you get this? You know, the Red Bull kind of esque thing with the emphasis on the energy, but still make it cool and groovy enough that it would be a place you'd want to go to have a cup of coffee. So caffeine cubed is in it. This is and, of course, with the coffeehouse. What we wanted to do was immediately put it into some practical orientation. So here's the local logo after lunch. I think what we'll do is we'll talk about the especially after lunch, the integration of illustrator into Photoshopped. One of the best things. The easiest tips for getting your logo work, which again I'd recommend starting illustrator simply copying and pasting them from illustrator via the Clipboard, Mac or PC into Photoshopped. You select the line work copy going to push up paste. When you paste into Photoshopped from illustrator, you get the option of Do you Want to paste? It is a shape layer as pixels as a path or as shape mentioned. So you've got a ton of options at your disposal in which to do your work, and this one you'll notice this right here is a smart objects. So this actually is the illustrator file embedded into photo shop, so I still have access to it, even with what I'm about to do, which is gonna be to wrap the logo around the cup. It's still the original vector information from Illustrator. And if the client says we've lost the Cube thing, we're just going to call it caffeine. With this unique spelling, I can literally double click here. It opens it back up in Illustrator. I take off that reposition my type close it comes back in, it will automatically re wrap it around the cup and do the jiggery pokery that I'm gonna do to blend it into it. So that's really nice from illustrator in terms of that integration, Same thing with in design. When we go from photo shop into in design as a Photoshopped document you can option are all double click on any graphic and immediately sends it from in design back into photo shop so you can tweak it. Close it automatically will take it right back in the in design repositions where it waas updated so that integration is important. There are a number of ways that I can tweak this graphic to comp up. We're now back accomp stage in this case because there's a very specific solution. They're looking for the merchandising, which nowadays is huge for this company. Product or service. So what would this look like? And how maney can they sell? So because this is a shape layer, I can transform this, um, without worrying about degrading the image, it all without getting soft pixels or anything else. The easiest way to do that is edit free transform, Commander Control T I don't do a lot of short cut. I mean, I use a ton of shortcuts, but there's some really nebulous ones. Commander Control T is one you need to memorize because it has at its disposal. While all these things if you go image okay at it, transform all of these things Scale rotates que distort warp, rotating flip or all within Commander control T Okay, if you want. Once you set up that commander control T, you can right click and all of them come up right up within the position here, including warp. Or you can use this little icon up here. Image warp. This works for photographs as well as shapes. So image warp. And if I had a piece of live type type warp has been Photoshopped for over 100 years. You can warp type that little, you know, Molokai piece of type of. I want to do a nice little bow on that. Ah, little conversion of it. There's nothing stopping you from just doing command tea and just doing a little arch, you know, to it or something like that. But in this case, I'm gonna come over here, move off to the side, and we turn on my obnoxious green circle so I can kind of getting it that the photograph is kind of skewed here to begin with. And then I'm going to click on this image up here, the image warp, okay. And so image work. And that brings up what's known as an envelope and this envelope here you can basically you have your entire image graphic or photograph at is made of rubber, which include including the center or whatever again. And because this is a vector shape, nothing that I do is actually going to tear the pixels. It's always going to go back to the vector shape. Probably not what I want to do there. But this envelope actually comes looking up here in the upper left with a bunch of preset envelopes or distortions. Transformations. So in this case, I want to do just in arc, okay? Versus on arch versus an ark. In other words, I want to be able to bend it to this cylindrical object his. So I'm going to art. You got bulging Web and flake flagging everything. All of these are the exact same things that available for live type. So if you're working on logos, you want to do the type kind of coming up here. This same thing is available in type. You go to your type tool, you're gonna find the same icon, and it works with life type. And you already know layer styles worked with live type. So anything that you do nothing is going to be distorted, but that in a second I'm gonna come over here. We're gonna go arch, it starts off, and there's only one little control point depending upon which envelope you use. This one only has one control point, only one little anchor square point, so I can come over here and click and start fine tuning it into submission. Now I can already see right here, and you can see if I move away from that control point, I can move the entire document. The little the layer Aiken. Click off the image warp and I'm back to, um, regular scale. So I'm still in this transformation. I could go back and forth as many times as I want in this transformation. I can even come up here and now I want to. I can see that this distortion it's looking a little. It's looking pretty good down here, but not as good up here. The fact that it's going away from the camera, I want a warp, this edge a little bit more. The shortcut for having access because you can see here. There's a few shortcuts I want to give you. If I just click on one of these corners, I am doing a distortion that's just clicking on an anchor point. If I hold down the shift key, okay, Mac or PC, it's going to constrain it. So it's proportional If I hold down Option and shift or Alton shift okay, it's going to do it from the center, okay? And the secret Mickey Mouse Club handshake that I want you all to remember is holding down the command key on the Mac or the control key on the PC is going to allow you to individually change the corner anchor points. So I come up here and find Tune these corners to better match up with my element here. Jacqui question the price. Mansfield could use a displacement maps to help warp or transform the image to the cup as well. Displacement Maps There are two filters and Photoshopped that allow used grayscale information to distort graphics. That's the displaced filter and the glass filter. Both of them are awesome. When I would dio maybe if you're nice, I'll show you that displace. It's It's absolutely incredible because you could take any photograph, texture, airbrush or whatever and say, Please warp this photograph, this flag, this texture based upon this image. So it's excellent dancer, that specific question. I would have to do a specific Grady int to come up with that this light area is bent. This direction in this dark area has been to different direction, so I would not use a displacement Matt for doing something like this to follow something around the contour I use it for putting a will, say logo or flag on a piece of rock or brick where it needs to follow all the grooves and textures and things like that. So it's excellent. The glass filter is great, and again I've got actions that use both of these, so it's really cool. The glass one can actually let you use a photograph to imitate the refraction of light through a surface. So if you want to do a chrome logo, that's not just chrome, because it's shiny but chrome because it's bending the image that's behind it. There's an action for that that I've written, and it's part of I believe that one is even part of a few by the the product today. And that was part of my one click while the full 900 Siri's. But yes, both those two filters are excellent at distorting, but I wouldn't use it for this one. Thank you. You want? Okay, so we'll just say that that for right now is good enough for government work will click on this thing here. We've got it. The last thing we want to do is it actually has to end. That's not nearly good enough. I can see right now that that's not the nice thing, since this is a shape layer, right? I just did a transformation and hit Enter. If this was a pixel layer, I would not want to transform a transformation because the 1st 1 would have distorted it and degraded. It would have gotten pixelated edges to go back in and do another one after it is degrading on already degraded image. Since this is vector, a smart object that was pasted as a shape layer from illustrator, I could distort this all day long. Still accounts from home and it will never degrade. Okay, the actual logo is still there. I can actually undo this transformation, and my original logo is still there. Okay, so that's good. Now I want to blend that into the cup and make it really useful. It's gonna take me about a week of custom airbrushing and masking out and fading in these highlights. Or I could just come over here and do that, but either one, whatever one you want to do. Basically, that was supposed to be a really smart ass comment, because that actually looks amazingly awesome. What I can tell you, um, again, I have to kill. You know it's using the blend modes, and what you can do with blend modes in photo shop is absolutely amazing. In terms of life savers and time savers. In this case, in graphic design, it's used a ton of different Grabenstein uses for it. I'm using the overlay or soft light blend modes there to blend modes in Photoshopped that are mind bogglingly useful overlay in soft light. They're known as the Dodge and burn blend modes, or the, uh, Dodge and burn blend. Modes are good ones. They are used to. Whatever is dark in the layer will burn onto its below, which is what's going on here. It's actually burning it into it. It's burning into it on Lee, where there are pixels to be burned. In other words, where that's light, it ignores it because there's nothing there for it to burn wherever it's light on. This layer would lighten that so we could actually even come up here and, you know, exaggerate some of the lighting in here. So it's incredibly useful, and I'll use maybe another one real quicks, and somebody asked about that this place filter. But soft light is the the soft sister to the extreme brother of overlay Overlay has a lot of contrast. It will increase saturation at the same time. Soft light is more subtle. They both through the same thing once more subtle than the other. And either one of these, whichever one floats your boat, Okay. And of course, you could combine it with something like I like the overlay, but I'm just going to reduce the opacity a little bit to make it blend in. So there is our before after, So there's comping up something. The main thing to remember here is free transform. You have a warp option. You have those envelopes at your disposal. What was the keyboard shortcut for going in the corner? So you have the ability to free destroying the command key on the maga control key on the PC lets you do a free distortion of it. You also have skew at your disposal, all sorts of things. Um, the last thing that I'll do here, I've got it in the right position. Can I use those layer styles that we did before? Obviously, it has to be something that is appropriate. I'd probably go to those halos, but I can come up here and do you know, Ah, Halo situation combined that with something like my soft light. That's not gonna probably gonna use the pastie more than anything. So if I want to, I am still. You can see the logo. The shine from the from the thing here. Now, since all I'm doing is changing, um, a layer style here. What could I have done? What can I do right now with this? I want to say this is a version I could say I could do two things you could do. One command s that will automatically give me a brand new history state. Done. Cool, right? I can go about Perego. Okay. Blending change. Let's go apply style. I didn't like that one. I like, OK, I like that one. Command s now you're using command s not because you like it. That's set in stone, but you're using the command s because you're actually saving your history snapshots. And now each one of those by simply going okay, I want that one out for their client click. And now I've got that is a separate document on its own. Okay, so I've got now. Multiple document. Okay, This one is still here. Which, by the way, that command t that type. Okay, that command t for live type image warp. Come up here. Yeah, by the way, command zero. When you can't see everything on your screen, the commander control zero says, show me everything, even if it's off the page. So that's a nice thing to know. Okay, so here is that live type treatment that I mentioned. So here we've got a piece of live type, and then just using that little image warped a whole new little feeling to it. So one going back to the coffee cups using that command ass or layer comp was the other thing. Since all I'm doing is changing layers styles than adding the layer comes because those air saved with the document. The other thing to remember is this idea of using whether for images or for typography, image warbird type warp is an excellent way to add another option in terms of a solution. Okay. Yes. Is there a way to manipulate um, Arkin there just just a portion of it in photo shockers I only done illustrator with with the type find No what you could do a very good question. I mentioned normal. I would do it in Illustrator. But if I was in here and I go now, I want to do a custom logo type for this one because the Molokai I want the m And maybe the A would do to say that I am right now to be specific, even though I've already funk ified it and have this, you know, extreme layer style on it. If I go here to this piece of type, what's the keyboard shortcut? The main shortcut. If in doubt, always do something right Click So I can right click coming over here and say, Come over here and convert to shape. In fact, let's undo that because the first thing that every do, if you're gonna take a piece of type and change it from live type into something else, duplicated right so you can get back to it. So always good to do a command or control layer. New via copy, Commander Control J. Another shortcut. You need to have duplicate current layer if you have a selection marching ants. Commander Control J duplicates the selection to a new layer. Okay, so, Commander control J absolutely essential layer via copy. Okay? Or Commander Control J. I've now got a duplicate. I can turn that off its job. Just a safety net in terms of talking about, um, housekeeping on your layers when they get really complex on my base layer, I'm usually gonna put a new folder underneath my base layer. And I just call this Miss Parts. Remember? Always misspell so your clients know that you're truly creative. So I've got this piece of type right here. Molokai. It's my live type, and it's This is your sock drawer. Okay, so you just put it in there. It's down at the bottom, below your base layer. Anything. The life type samples before your muck about with something. Just throw your extras in there as a safety net. That's why god made folders. Okay, so we've got the type here. I'm going to right click. Come over here and say convert to shape. It is now vector still Resolution independent. I still have access to 10 billion things over here in this portion of the tool palette over here in Photoshopped. These little lines separate out different ways of working in photo shop. So that line right there has the pen tool, the type tool, the select tools and this shape tools. All these are resolution independent. This is the mini version of Illustrator built into photo shop. Okay, awesome. Fantastic. Cool. Groovy. We could spend a month on these right here. Lisa Snyder is teaching our class later in the week. Hopefully, she will touch on these. Should have confirmed with her. I'm gonna come over here and go to the direct select tool in that little section of it, because that's going to allow me to come up here and take this one. And what I'm doing is by dreck, select the Hollow Aero versus the full arrow. Aiken, select individual anchor points that make up this piece of vector type. And by coming up here and clicking on this dancer question, I can customize the font, the topography, or whatever I want here just exactly the same way that I would do an illustrator. And because I'm using layer styles, you'll notice that the layer saw says, I don't care what you do. Do it. I apply my effect of the transition between what's opaque and transparent. You just changed it by scaling it. Okay, I get also. Well, this is active. It will be. The next question is can I now free Transform one particular letter form separate from the others. And yes, by converting it into a shape. Now, every single letter, you can do whatever you want to it. Maybe this one is just scaled up. Okay, a little bit. Not quite that big. We got that really cool blending thing. So now I have taken that one. Of course, I could scale it a regular font just by changing the phone size. But I've scaled it up. I've distorted the letter for him a little bit. I can, you know, do whatever I want. So yes, unanswered question. You can do it. That's how you do it. You right Click on it and say, convert to shape. Okay. And of course, because you have a layer style, there's nothing stopping you from, you know, changing that. We don't need the piece of type. So it's click on a photograph so you can continue to change any attribute that you want layer styles are so forgiving and friendly. They and even we have to do in this kind of a graphic one. So you can dio, you know, strokes, things that are much more traditional. Graphic then just the glass and chrome that you saw so weaken it can be whatever you, you know, like it layer styles have so much don't get me started That's why I'm giving you guys a bunch of it. Because if I didn't give you some, you'd go. That's such a tease, right? Yeah, that's really cool, huh? So okay. Other questions. Yeah. Let's take a few questions ending in the studio audience before we go online. Is there any way you can talk about how you did that, Princess Diana? Painterly? Look, um, no, I actually, you know our words to London. One of the really cool things. Actually, I can being one of the things that is cool and the reason why I can I can mention it is because I have giving you guys a action that does a huge amount of that already. And it's up from I taught a class on painting which you can actually dancer question. You could purchase the painting class that I did from Photoshopped week. It's just a one day I'm actually working on what will be a semester class on painting, which will be out July next month. So that will give you soup to nuts on painting in watercolor and sketches and everything. But the thing that I'll mention here, I'm gonna come over here and do that Dr Brown Services and I'll do that play somatic. And the reason why I'm going to show you that is that I have this really cool thing that giving to you guys and you can get it at the Facebook page. Jack Davis. Wow. And then, like that page and there's this thing right here. Um, the smart object painting beta. Okay, smart object painting. And this Presupposes that you've got photo shop CS 60 K C. S six or after because they added the oil paint filter. And the cool thing about this is when you play this action and this one is a really low rest file, it creates what's known as a smart filter recipe. So it actually will to do automate that process a lot, which is nice for portrait, because if you have to hand paint using the mixer brush that takes, you know, really forever. But this is real nice in the sense that this smart filter recipe, which uses this right here, is the oil pain filter, and we can take our scale down, so it's not as stylized. We're gonna take that. And what kind of fine tune this So again, this is a super low rez sample here. But the nice thing about the oil pain filter is it does this falling of the contours and the stroking. What the rest of this little action does is that adds things like the paint skipping across the surface. And again, all of these. The nice thing about when you do have a smart object and you apply a filter to it. That filter is what's called a smart filter. It's not destructive. It's procedural. All its being remembered is the process. So if I want to, I can come up here and change this the stroke length or the detail to whatever I want it to be after the fact. So I use a lot of smart filters. I use a lot of layer styles. That means I have the really great quality cause it was always expected. The original flexibility cause everything is completely non destructive and speed. Because once I do it, if I had another photograph, the great thing about I'm smart filter recipes is if I have another photograph, let's say this one we're doing with Portrait, Another watercolor not working, Winifred Portrait. We'll do that. Same place, somatic, is that if I have that recipe that I used over here, I can find my, uh, coloring. If I've got that smart filter recipe, where'd you go? No, because like I said, this is not how I set up my computer. I've got my different tabs. And since I don't normally use the tab environment, 1,000,000 costs would kill me for knowing that. But so here is because she loves them. Uh, so I've got my painting here. Let's go back to this file. And that's why it's tabbed in the same way. The nice thing about smart filters once you come up with something, in this case, I've customized. I changed the scale. You can literally just drag it to another document, and it will automatically apply it to that image. Now, this is a high res image. So in this case, I would do the exact same kind of, um, thing that I did before, where I could come up here and customize it so I can go to that oil paint filter. And now take my scale back up, take my scale and stylization back up. You can see what it does in terms of that, um wonderful, the hair, okay. And even the eyes and things like that. So here is and it's re rendering it. So here is the start for paintings that answer your question. A great starting point is using the oil paint filter is built into CS six, especially for Portrait's. I've given you an action that automatically applies all these different steps to it, and every single person watching at home wherever you are has it because it's that's a free part. I specifically put in that into my freebies on my Facebook page. So you'll download those pre sense and look for what is called right here. The wow smart object painting. Okay, Beta. It works on eight bit files, not 16 bit. That oil paint filter doesn't work in 16 bit, so there's a few caveats there, but it's awesome. Other questions we dio Steven in Seattle ass. Is there an effective way of turning a raster pixel based image into a vector based shape so it can be more easily manipulated? Very good question. Um, yes, there is. There's built into photo shop and built into, um, illustrator. Normally, Illustrator is better. It actually has tools specifically for doing a vector trace of a bit mapped image. But I'll just show you, uh, this one. Just since we have it here and give you a couple more tips, quick, let's say that you had I'm gonna flatten this file. So let's say that this is a design. This is a comp. This is a business card that you're given that you have to do something with. Oh, I hope you never ever have to do that for somebody. But this is a piece of artwork, and I now want to turn it into a vector shape. So I could one hand trace, and I do have the pen tool here, and you can go through that. The other thing is that if you can get marching ants, if you can get the Marquis than anything that you can get marching ants on in photo shop, you can turn into a shape, and the easiest way to do that is with a hidden Mickey Mouse Club handshake. And that is you can use the opacity or the luminosity of anything and load that as a selection. Very, very cool. It's definitely one of those things. I think this is. There's a blue steel. What? Blue steel? Yeah, I don't know. No, no. These teeth. You don't want anything going anywhere near anything like that. Okay, so what you're gonna need is your channels palette and in this case, what you're gonna do. And here's the shortcut. Is that command on the Mac or control clicking on anything? Any thumbnail loads it as a selection. So I'll repeat that because it's incredibly cool, Commander Control clicking on anything, Meaning the thumbnail. And we're talking about thumbnails here. A thumbnail in the layers palette, a layer mask, a channel, a shape layer. Ah, path layer. Whatever it is, commander control, clicking on it loads it as a selection. Now, in the case of a layer, it would use the transparency of that layer. Well, there's no transparency. This is a flat piece of graphic. So if I command click on it, which I can dio, it loads the entire document as one big selection. But what happens if you go to the channels? Palette, the channels? What channels do? Is they store selections in the olden days before there were layers? When I went the first How to Book in the World on Photoshopped, Burt Munro wrote the first book, His Was an Awesome Manual. The Photoshopped Wow book was more of Ah, recipe book, so that was pre layers. So Channels was a huge part of that book just because that's how you could isolate elements. But anyway, to cut the short commander control clicking on any of these, I'll just do that. RGB loads all my wonderful artwork, whether this was a sketch I did, whether it was a business card, I scanned whether it was anything, whether it's a photograph of Bob Su, Jimmy or whatever it is loading that as a selection. If it has grayscale information, what is white will be completely selected. Whatever is black would be completely unsolicited. If it's a shade of gray, will be partially selected It's excellent. It's cool. We can't go into do you support? But this is extremely cool, because the question is, how do I convert this into a shape? Well, first off, the white is what selected. Okay, the white is the selection. The black is not selected. So I'm gonna go first, Commander Control, click on one of my channels in this case because is pure black and white. They're all the same. If if this was a color photograph of a portrait, each one of the red, green or blue would be different, and then I'm gonna go to under select. Since we're dealing with selections, we'd come up here and in verse, this selection. So now it is actually the black that is selected. There's a little teeny frame, black frame. That's why you have still seeing marching ants around there. So now the black is what is selected. And then what you're going to dio since we're talking about paths we're talking about shapes is you go to the paths palette and down here, the past palette has all these different options. So if we come over here stroke path with a brush, okay, we don't have a path yet, So these air Presupposes. That's why it's giving me the X load path of selection. This one is not great. Out. Make work path from selection. How cool is that? Remember when Adobe gives you a little thing like that? What are you supposed to do? I didn't know that. Thank you. Write feign ignorance. Click on it. And I now have a complete working path. And let's open up our There's our past palette right here and we can turn off our vector. There is our entire graphic, um, in path format. Now, I could then copy this into the Felix pay sport into illustrator to find Tune it. I could work on it here. I could come up here to, um here, create a solid color. Now, this is now we're getting a little tricky. I had the path I selected. How'd I select it? A command clicked on the thumbnail in the channels. Palette loads, any transparency as a selection. I got marching ants. Then what did I do? Marching ants first? I inverse the selection because I wanted the black to be what was selected. Okay, not the white. Then I and then I went to the past palette. I go. Please make worth pack. Please. Please make work path from selection. No problem. You can go into the past palate. You can find tune the tolerance, how closely it's gonna follow the lines. So you confined to in this? A bit of how close it is. Two. Once I had the path, the Pac was still active. All I need to do there is no shape layer icon down here in the layers palette. So what I did while that path was active It's here in the paths palette. I come over here and I make that Remember these 1st 3 I could even make Go right to pattern. If I want to make this a vector shaped, pineapple filled thing, I can go right for path on your right to Grady int, right? Great. And I'm I I use a lot of radiance in this actual final artwork. I use Grady. It's a lot. So I could go right for grading. In this case, I'm just gonna go solid color. It knows I have the vector, and it automatically turns that into a shape layer. And here now is exactly what was requested. A vector based shape resolution. Independent image made from flat artwork. Yes, extremely useful, whether it's a starting point or in point. Actually, sometimes it's nice, because if you do a rough sketch, then you end up with this really kind of neat organic looking. And yet it's still graphic. And use that as a final, you know, do a Dua hand sketch and turn it in and say, I meant to do that right? So turn a bug into a feature. Well, I think it's so cool. I my mom drew me out a logo. She's a calligrapher, and I had no idea how to do that. Oh, okay. Now you want something really cool after want? No, No, because we're right here. Okay, I've got this. This is Let's say this is my logo. I want this in Photoshopped forevermore. I want this for water marking. I want this in the bottom of my images. I want to be a way to do this on the website. I want this. This is gold because its resolution independent. It's great. It's cool to awesome. Let's say I find tuned it to make it exactly what I wanted to edit. Define custom shape. You've now just put this into your own shape Library permanently built into photo shop. So we're going to call the space cadet And what that Just do it. Just this right here is our shape, layer icon, ellipse tool But hidden within the ellipse tool if you click and hold it down is the custom shape Cool. And if you didn't know it which most people don't you've got an entire library of clip art built in two Photoshopped all resolution independent, great place for starting on lowers or whatever it comes with all these right here. Okay, But the cool thing is, you can actually, since they stick up so little memory, right click. Would you say please load in the entire bloody library for everything And these air all vector shapes that are now at your disposal that you can use for starting anything, including copyrights and watermarks. But this right here, let's create a new document. Okay, Go to our shape layer. We've got our thing here. That is my logo in a separate document and whatever you know, color I happen to currently have active and I could do whatever I want with it. So it's vector its resolution upended. It's now part of your what is known as your shape library.

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3D Transform-Before.psd
Caffein3 fin flat logo.ai
Davis One-Click Wow Preset Sampler 2013.zip
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Davis-Design as Storytelling.pdf
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