Designing a Halftone Business Card
1. Let us first start by creating a new document in Adobe Photoshop. With Photoshop open, go to File -> New… This opens the new document window. In this window are various fields that allow you to set the dimensions and other settings for the printing of your business card. You will have to set this to your business card specifications. If you do not know what dimensions to set, you can start by entering these following values.
2. The first thing we have to do is to setup the color background. We will not be using a white color of course. Choose two main theme colors that you like for the background. Set them as the foreground and background color. Do this by just clicking on their respective color boxes at the bottom of the tools panel.
3. Once you have set the two colors, select the Gradient Color tool in the tools panel. Click and drag the tool across our background layer to add the seamless color gradient. Remember that you can change the style of the gradient color by selecting the icons on the options bar above. Just play with the angle and style of your gradient until you have something that you like.
4. Great! Now, before we continue, let us first add some guidelines. While these will not be visible on printing, it is important as it will help you judge the proper distance your text and other design elements should have from the edge. To add a guideline, just go to View -> New Guide… You will see a window open. Here you will choose the orientation of the guideline you are about to create as well as its distance from the edge of the document.
5. For a typical business card, you will want to place in a margin of 0.25 inches from the edge of the design. If you are printing with a professional printing company, you may want to ask them about this so that you can match your guideline with their cutting and printing procedures. For our example, we place 4 guidelines for the top, bottom, left and right sides of the design. Here are the precise details.
- Top Margin: Horizontal – 0.125 inch
- Bottom Margin: Horizontal – 1.875 inches
- Left Margin: Vertical – 0.125 inches
- Right Margin: Vertical – 3.375 inches
6. Now we can get down to business of creating our design. Our first move to do this is to actually add a brush style to make it easier for you to add the halftone pattern. You can download the halftone custom brush for Photoshop from this generous person here (http://www.brushking.eu/164/halftone-brushes.html). Save that to your computer and then select the brush tool in your Photoshop. Bring up the context menu by right clicking on your design. Look for the right arrow icon (top right) and click on it. Then choose “Load Brushes” in the side menu that appears.
7. Once the load window appears, navigate to the location where your custom brush is saved. Make sure that you look for the “.abr” file. Click on it and then select the option to “open”. This should now load the brush set to your brush gallery choices.
8. Next, create a new layer. Do this by going to Layer -> New Layer… A window should open. Just enter a name for our new layer as you see fit. Here we used the name Halftone. It is best to leave the rest as default.
9. Next, select the brush tool again. Set another one of your theme colors that is different from the ones used in the background. Right click on the canvass and once the context menu appears, look for your new brush in the gallery. Select it, adjust its size. Then, with our new layer active, just paint in the halftone pattern.
10. Next, we duplicate the halftone layer by selecting it in the layers panel pressing CTRL+J. With the duplicate selected, press CTRL+T. Right click on it in the canvass to bring up the context menu. Select the option to “flip horizontal”.
11. Then, moved the flipped layer to the other side of the design. Press CTRL+T again and right click on it. This time choose the option “flip vertical”.
12. Then, let us merge both of these halftone layers. Select them both in the layers panel. Right click on them. Then on the context menu select “merge layers”.
13. Great! Now, we will add some color variations to the halftone layer itself. To do this, double click on the halftone layer to bring up its layer styles. In the layer styles window click on the option “gradient overlay”. Then we set the color to our original color, as well as another theme color. IN this example we have the original yellow and then an orange color.
14. Then, we just reduce the opacity of this layer just so that it does not stand out too much. Just change the opacity value of the halftone layer to around 90%.
15. Afterwards, it is time to add the text. We just use the text tool to type in the text. It is best to vary the font style for the name and the other details. Her we are using different variations of Helvetica Neue.
16. Then, finally, we add the logo at the center. To make it stand out against the background, we just use a white silhouette for the background.
17. Then the finishes our stylish halftone business card. You can now use these same techniques for your own cards. Just customize the colors, orientations and of course the font style. Good Luck!
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