Photoshop Zone

    Introduction I love doing type treatments. Out of all the designs I’ve created so far, it’s typographic illustrations that have always taught me a lot, mainly because I’ve usually tried to make the most of Photoshop and Illustrator’s tools. You are practically forced to create most of it from scratch, so how much you polish your design determines how good it will be. In this tutorial, I went for a decorative look, by firstly choosing a typeface: Ayosmonika. I’ve used it before, and this time I wanted to go for a more flat look. The font seems very organic to me, so I sought and found a good online resource, the ornate pattern freebie. It’s got lots of rich detail, so it’s enough for what we want. My initial colors were violet and yellow, but they seemed out of place. I later decided to go with a wood texture, and bronze shades (new and aged) for the decorative elements. These colors would give me an old-world look, so even though it’s not how i...

In this tutorial, we’ll be using layer styles to make a plastic gel-type style that you can easily apply to text and shapes. You can download the PSD file from the link at the bottom of the tutorial to just copy+paste the styles. Step 1: BACKGROUND LAYER We start as always with a background gradient. I’ve used a Radial Gradient with two shades of the exact same brown that this site uses. The exact color codes are: Foreground color – #2f2520 Background color – #1e1916 Step 2: Now in a nice delectable green, we write a word. I’ve written ‘Jelly’ and used the font "Gill Sans Ultra Bold." Bolder fonts are good for this sort of effect because there is more room to actually do stuff with the styles. Step 3: So now we right-click on the layer and choose Blending Options to start adding styles. First we add a drop shadow to lift the letters off the background and then an inner shadow. Later on when we add highlights, this shadow will contrast nicely w...

Book cover design Photoshop tutorial in less than ten layers Book cover design generally takes longer to prepare for than it actually does to put together. It took me around 45 minutes to gather the elements I needed for the book cover and only 15 minutes to actually design it. I have kept the design very simple so that a beginner could achieve similar results. So, let’s cut the talk and show you how you can very easily design a book cover like the one above. Book cover template Now is the time to open up Photoshop and that book cover template we created in part one complete with guides for bleed that is set to CMYK so that our end result is print ready. Our book is based on a 5.5″ x 8.5″ end product. When you go searching for your images to use in your book, this translates to 1688 × 2625 pixels because of the difference between 300ppi print ready resolution and the web’s paltry...