Art and Design in Photoshop

Steve Caplin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138401099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136110931
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics

Fancy designing your own classic and contemporary movie posters, books and magazine covers?

Feel like turning your photographs into works by Turner, Matisse and Magritte?

Want to create illustrations in the styles of The Simpsons, steampunk and Victorian engravings?

Then you need Art and Design in Photoshop.

In this unique book, acclaimed master of photomontage and visual trickery Steve Caplin shows you how to stretch your creative boundaries. Taking the same tried-and-tested practical approach as his best selling How to Cheat in Photoshop titles, Steve's step-by-step instructions recreate a dazzling and diverse array of fabulous design effects. You'll learn how to design everything from wine labels to sushi cartons, from certificates to iPod advertising, from textbooks to pulp fiction.

Written by a working pro, the clear guidelines pinpoint exactly what you need to know: how to get slick-looking results with minimum fuss, with a 16-page Photoshop Reference chapter that provides an at-a-glance guide to Photoshop tools and techniques for less experienced users. Steve explains both typography and the design process in a clear, informative and entertaining way.

All the images, textures and fonts used in the book are supplied on the downloadable resources. Imaginative, inspirational and fun to use, this book is a must-have for every creative Photoshop user, both amateur and professional.

Poster design

We’re advertised at in magazines and in newspapers. We’re assailed by commercials on TV, in the cinema, even on the DVDs we buy. Is the only way to get away from them to go for a long walk?

Not if you live in the city, it isn’t. Posters shriek at us from all sides: from billboards, from hoardings, from bus stops. In subways, in shop windows, and on placards on the street.

With so many signs all fighting for our attention, the advertising agency that designs them has to work hard to grab our interest. In some European countries, a grinning face holding the product is enough to send housewives scurrying for that brand of washing powder; but for most of us, advertising is a subtle and sophisticated art that tries to win our hearts through emotional and intellectual content.

In this chapter we’ll look at how different kinds of posters are put together, from Victorian times to the present day.

poster

1. A large, usually printed placard, bill, or announcement, often illustrated, that is posted to advertise or publicize something.
2. An artistic work, often a reproduction of an original painting or photograph, printed on a large sheet of paper.

American Heritage Dictionary

1838, from post in the verbal sense of ‘fasten to a post’ (1633).

Online Etymology Dictionary

04.01 Victorian playbill

We need to load a lot of fonts to make this poster work. Here I’ve used the fonts Headline One, Fette Egyptienne, and Plastische Plakat-Antiqua for the main headline. Set each line so that it takes up the full width of the page.

The cast of characters is set in the font Slab Serif HPLHS, a very condensed serif. We can’t set tab stops in Photoshop - the program’s word processing capabilities are very limited - so we’ll have to make the text up by hand.

Photoshop doesn’t support ‘leader dots’ as there are no tabs to be placed, so we have to type them in by hand. A string of full stops would be too tight, so type ‘dot space dot space’ in the gaps. Leaving a couple of extra spaces helps the text to look more hand set, as if the type were slightly damaged.

The rest of the poster is set in the same fonts we used earlier, with the addition of Cairo for the ‘To be, or not to be’ line. Victorian posters tended to be very wordy: you can’t get away with minimal information here. Take the time to write extra lines to make the effect more convincing.

The huge explosion of typographic design in the 19th century gave poster designers a vast new range of fonts to work with. Some were bold some delicate, some playful; the choice was immense.

Printers would buy in sets of typefaces at set display sizes, and frequently they wouldn’t own more than one or two sizes of a particular font. This, in part, explains the way the reader is overwhelmed with such a huge variety of type styles: it’s almost as if a different font were used for each size.

Liberties were often taken with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• Typography
• Principles of design
• Contemporary design
• Poster design
• Comedy movies
• Works on paper
• Books and magazines
• Great works of art
• Bridget Riley
• Packaging
• Any other business
• Photoshop reference
• Index