The Concept

I first saw a graphic piece on Flickr one day and it basically had a heart with a bunch of words filling it.  From there I got inspired to do my own version by using the name of that special person and then making a heart from the words that describe her or my feelings about her.  Along with just the typography, I’d also put images that describes her personality and finally capture it as what I see in my heart.

Step 1 – Making the Background

The background simply consists a gradient using a yellow-light blue-dark blue color scheme.  As you can see, I made the center to be light to give hint that the center will be the main focus of the piece.  I found a stock of a sky that filled the vertical area well and set that to soft light while masking a few parts that I didn’t like (mainly the edges of the piece since I wanted to have some parts faded out and other parts more prominent).

Step 2 – Main Content

Here I began creating the main focus of the piece which is the typography part.  In terms of design difficulty, all I had to do was make a heart shape and adding a gradient and stroke to it, and then I began filling in adjectives and adverbs.

The hardest part of this was actually coming up with the words that I felt, as well as wording and placing them in a way that the words would fit inside the heart shape.  In addition to just having text, I experimented with different opacities to make some words more prominent and kind of give the eye a tease of jumping back and forth between what words pop out.

Step 3 – Decorating your main focus

In this step, I simply added embellishments by finding stocks of flowers, and leaves to surround the heart to give it background of some sort.  By simply masking parts I don’t need and rearranging layers, I can make the heart look like it’s been enraptured in the foliage.

Step 4 – More Decoration

I brought in more stocks in particularly a lion, parrot, and a lime to give the piece more color, and different depths of photomanipulation.  Again, I masked out parts that shouldn’t be shown, and in addition, I found that using the old “Duplicating the layer and giving it a blur and setting it to soft light/hard light” to be quite useful in making the pictures more vivid.

Other than that adjustment, all the pictures so far are on normal blending mode since I didn’t want the stocks to blend with the blue background.

Step 5 – Starting to Add Details

I begin to add details by adding some splatters, and some inkblots stocks that I’ve had.  I wanted to add more depth into the piece and so one way to do that is to simply give objects in the scene a shadow to show that there is a distinction between that object the background.

You can use either the “Drop Shadow” option within the Blending Options of the layer OR what I do is add my own shadows by making a new layer behind the object that I want to add a shadow to and brush behind the objects with a “Soft Round Brush” with black and played around with the opacity of the layer and erased any unnecessary bits that didn’t flow with the piece.

Step 6 – Adding more depth and decorations

Now I began to add more to the piece by adding a polaroid background behind the heart and more splatters.  I introduced some more text on the bottom of the polaroid by choosing a font and setting the opacity down.  The splatters were simple to integrate as they were on white background and so I set the blending mode of them to multiply to show the splatter, and the white background is simply gone.

Step 7 – Faded lines

A technique (if you want to call it that) that I started to use was making lines and bars of different colors and masking them with textured brushes to give a faded out look.  It works well in abstract and grungy pieces and doesn’t make the piece harsh by having the masked parts.

As you can see below, all you need to do to make these type of lines is to have shape/layer of anything, and give it a layer mask and use a textured brush to mask some parts of it away.

Step 8 – Adjustment Layers and Scanlines

As we get closer to the end, I decided that the piece needed some adjustment layers to bring up the colors and make the color brighter.  I added a Curves layer, and some Gradient Maps and set them to soft light.

In addition, I added scanlines to give the background some texture.  Scanlines are simply just patterns and I filled the background with it.  Below is a step by step process of how to create scanlines fast.

Step 9 – Colorful Light Flares

To top the piece off, I added some “Light Flares” to the piece to give lighting and more color.  You’ll find these among a lot of graphic pieces since they are quite popular and they do add more to the piece in terms of effects.

By simply making a new layer and using soft brushes of different colors, set the layer to screen or linear dodge, and notice how they add more color and lighting to a piece.

Conclusion – Final Result

Of course your piece may or may not look like this, but that’s not the point.  The main point is to show the simple process of making a graphic like this and showing some techniques that are used in them.  I hope you enjoy the tutorial, and subscribe and keep updated with Creative-Le Studios for more.

Here’s a quick business card template for those that need a template with all the guides (For Photoshop).

This is a blank PSD Template for a Business Card. Yes there’s a lot out there, so I just made one for you guys just in case you were looking around in the downloads category. Standard size for the business card and has guides for the all the bleed zones, cutting zones, and safety margins.

Download Business Card PSD Template

Enjoy the resource, and be on the look out for more downloads and resources.

Adobe (famously known for their Photoshop and Flash products) have finally launched a tease of their new products.  It’s almost like everything we dreamed that CS4 could do, they implemented it into CS5.  Knowing that, I’m already going to be in awe to see what CS6, CS7, CS8, and such will bring to the new generation.

Adobe’s new CS is coming soon

As always, there are a few suites a designer or developer can buy to gain access to a collective of programs that would help their workflow and save a few hundred dollars.  There’s the creative design suite for those dealing with design, and there’s also the web suite which is obviously tailored for the web designers and developers.  Or, if you have the money to spend, then you can drop it all on the master collection.

Adobe TV Launches Creative Suite 5 Features

Adobe just launched their video to show some of the features behind Adobe CS5 Suite in action.  If you haven’t watched it yet, you should go and take a look at Adobe TV and watch the movie.

The video shows many unique features from content aware fill, to smart dashes, to browser control.

CS5 Features that made me go “Wow”

There’s so many features of CS5 that was shown, and probably features that they haven’t shown, but already the Web features they showed has almost gotten me to take the switch to use Dreamweaver….or maybe not.

Dreamweaver

The new Adobe Dreamweaver showcases a better engine to be able to view/edit sites made through complex platforms like Wordpress or Joomla. In addition, you can see all the linked files that makes the site run, and it also features a new add-on program called “Browser Lab” or something like that (only watched the video once). Basically, it mimics all the current browsers and older browsers so that you can see how your site matches up in different browsers especially that dreadful and annoying Internet Explorer. The best thing about it is the “Onion Skin” mode where you can compare the different browser’s rendering on top of each other and see the little differences between them via outlines.

Photoshop

Smart Radius. Smart Radius. Smart Radius. I’m not spamming for keywords, but just to say that this new tool gets rid of a lot of problems when cutting a stock that has difficult areas such as hair, or spikes. Remember pen tooling to get those exact cut? Well, with smart radius you can do a nice clean extraction without having to spend a lot of time zooming into the picture and adjusting your pen tool points. Although it probably won’t be as exact as the pen tool, you’re still saving a lot of time that can be spent, sleeping or doing another work.

Flash Catalyst

Flash Catalyst is a new addition to the Adobe family, and basically it gives designers a chance to make some really good looking flash sites without delving into any Actionscript or code at all. I’m not familiar on how it works, but from the looks of it, you can import your PSD or AI and then probably just add effects to it like presets in After Effects. I’m excited to see what this program can do. Although, my hatred of flash is pretty much on top of my mind now. I’m not an advocate of HTML5 and it’s new canvas engine, neither am I a big hater of Flash, I just hope that Flash Catalyst can actually help me get through my flash animation obstacles that clients always want. However, on another note, if you haven’t heard about HTML5 or seen any development, check out this article about HTML5 and how it can replace flash (for simple things at least).

Is CS5 worth to get

I don’t know. The thing that’s holding me back is the fact that it’s not out yet and I don’t quite have the money to upgrade. However, I will download the trial because I’m more interested in the new Dreamweaver and seeing how fast it can be. Like most people, I like doing code in its most archaic form. Notepad (well, Coda/Notepad++) and Mozilla Firefox along with those Firefox add-ons for web development.

Typography has always been a favorite topic of mine, and I can already say that I’m not even close to a beginner in knowing all the techniques, “rules”, and properties of typography. As I grow older as a designer, I want to slowly strive to be better artist in typography. There’s something about fonts, placement, and the way you decorate the letters that makes me really appreciate the simplicity of typography at the same time be in awe on the complexities of making good typography art. As I delve into this topic, I’ll share my experiences and hopefully I can get better as time goes by.

In the meantime, here’s a walk through of my first experiment with typography and utilizing Adobe Illustrator (I’m using CS4 but I’m sure it can be done with CS and up) and Photoshop.

Final Result

Preproduction – The Concept of the Piece

To be honest, I didn’t plan to make this piece about Greek letters, I just saw the greek glyphs in Illustrator and decided to use them. It wasn’t until I made the background for my piece until I decided to think of the saying, “It’s all greek to me”. Ever get that feeling when somebody is talking in a different language, and you’re trying to understand it, but at the same time you know you’re lost? This piece is attributed to that.

Step One – Creating 3D Text in Illustrator

To create 3D Text in Illustrator, you first create your text that you want to have. For my piece, I was playing around with the glyphs of my font. To see the glyphs window in Illustrator, go to Window > Type > Glyphs. I noticed a lot of greek letters in there, and I wanted to work with it, so that’s why I chose the text I did now. The font I used was Avant Garde.

After typing your text and giving them a color, it’s time to make them 3D. To do this, make sure your click on your text that you want to apply the 3D effect and then simply go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. You’ll get a new dialog menu that will show you a few options on how you want to rotate your text, how much you want to extrude, and if you want to bevel it or not.

Depending on your piece, the settings will be different, so I’m going to leave that up to you. As a reminder if you wanted to see the 3D text live before you apply the effect, click on the preview check box. Please note that it may render slow/fast depending on your computer specs.

Step Two – Importing to Photoshop

Now that we created our 3D Text in Illustrator, it’s time to import it into Photoshop. The quick and easy way is to just copy and paste it into your Photoshop document. I created a new Photoshop document, 900×1200, and then I pasted the text into the document. You’ll get a dialog box asking how you want to paste it. Make sure you check “Smart Object“, and then you can click “OK”. By importing it as a smart object into Photoshop, you are now able to resize it up and down without distorting it.

As you can see here, I imported 3D text and from there I scaled it, rotated it around, and positioned it. (Don’t clear out the smart object unless you’re positive that you’re not going to change it). If the 3D text doesn’t look good at that angle, then it’s back to the drawing board with Illustrator to position it in the way that you want. You can also position the text correctly in Illustrator and import it into Photoshop. (Now that I think of that, that’s probably more efficient than what I did)

Step Three – Building Text together

Now we get to the fun part of playing Tetris with your text. Start positioning your text the way you want. I decided to build them at one angle to make it easy for me, but feel free to experiment around with it.

Step Four – Creating the background

For the background, you can already see that I made a linear gradient background from sky blue to light purple (Somewhat close to those colors). I also duplicated my 3D text a few more times and rotated it and positioned it to make a collage of my 3D Text.

Then I took that collage and duplicated it more and created a background from it. I merged them all together and set the layer to “Multiply“. I made “holes” in the background to reveal the background and underneath my collage background layer I put another layer of my collage set to Normal blending option. I gave my big collage background that’s set to Multiply a blending option of “Drop shadow” to show that the background looks like it’s breaking or peeling off.

Step Five – Post Production Effects

And finally the post production effects — I added a “Curves” Layer, “Gradient Map” Layer, and a few other enhancements to spice it up a bit.

Conclusion

This tutorial wasn’t too detailed on the steps, but I hope you got the steps for creating 3D text in Illustrator better. I’ll be looking up for sites about typography and learn some tutorials and come back for you guys to make a good simple illustration. Thanks for viewing my tutorial and enjoy.

Final Result

Here’s what you will be making at the end of this tutorial (maybe not exactly, but the shape in there will be made):

You’ve probably seen these shapes quite often, whether it be my portfolio or in general designs out there. They are pretty trendy and add a lot of decoration to a design. When used right, the colors can be a great addition to a design and add that sense of abstractness.

Let’s set up our canvas. You should be able to do this with Photoshop CS and up. (maybe even Photoshop 7, it’s been a long time since I used that so I forgot whether it had custom shapes or not)

Step 1 – Setting Up Your Canvas

I always like to make a new canvas that’s 500px by 500px for all of my testings and experimentation when making shapes or brushes. It’s enough space to mess around with, and it’s not too small.

Step 2 – Setting Up Your Tools

The next step is to set up the custom shape tools so that you’ll be able to make your new custom shape. The settings I have are pictured above.

I turned Shape Layers on so that I can see the shape with color. And since this is our first shape it’s automatically defaulted to Creating a New Shape Layer. So pick the circle shape and let’s make our first circle.

Don’t make too big of a circle since you’ll need the space to add additional shapes.

Step 3 – Adding Multiple Shapes

While your circle is still selected (you’ll see a little ring around it), change the option of the custom shape tool to Add to Shape Area (+). From here, you can just have a free for all in making circles just like the picture below.

HINT: You don’t have to necessarily switch to that custom shape option. Rather you can hold shift, and your cursor will have a little plus sign similar to the cursor when you choose that option.

Step 4 – Subtracting From Your Custom Shape

Sometimes you may have added too many shapes, or you want to give your shape some interesting cuts in it. By choosing the Subtract Area (-) option, you can make shapes that will cut/erase your current shape like below.

It may look a bit busy, but if you wanted to see how your shape looks like without the pen lines, you can just hide them by pressing Crtl/Cmd+H.

Step 5 – Defining Your Custom Shape

After you finishing make your shape, select the pen tool from your tool bar or press the Photoshop shortcut key “P” and right click on the shape. You will see the option to “Define Custom Shape…”

After you click on that, name your custom shape and press “Ok“. You now have a custom shape. To access this custom shape, go to your custom shapes menu and look for it. Usually, newly created ones will show up last on the list.

And now you can use your shape as many times as you want, and even resize it without losing any pixels because it’s not rasterized yet.

Here’s my result after messing around with the same shape. I flipped it, I duplicated it, I rotated and changed it’s colors.

You can do a lot by making your own shapes. You’re not even limited to circles. Use other shapes, or even use custom shapes you’ve already made. The sky’s your limit on this one.

Conclusion

Thanks for looking at my tutorial about creating abstract custom shapes for Photoshop. If you have any questions or confusion, comment below and I’ll get to them. Show off your results as well here, or share a link.