2.8 Creating the Flyer Text and Final Effects

Hey guys, welcome back to Event Flyer Design. My name is Kirk Nelson, and we are going to finish off the sporting event flyer in this lesson. This is lesson number ten, where we add some confetti, some text, and some finishing effects. So here's where we left off after last lesson where we created these flying ribbons out of the cloth photographs. This lesson we're going to add some more fun elements to bring some life and some energy to the scene. We're going to create some confetti that's flying around. Now you may think illustrating hundreds of little pieces of flying paper is going to be rather onerous and somewhat difficult. But it's really not. I'm gonna show you a wonderful trick on how to do it easily. First, I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to use the polygonal selection tool and just draw out a very small and very irregular polygonal shape. Something that would look like it's a scrap of paper, and fill that with black. And then, with the selection still active, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. And we get this shape defining a brush, and we're gonna call this confetti. Now, we can cancel the selection, and we can even hide or delete that entire layer. Cuz we're going to then be brushing the confetti onto its own new layer. But first, we need to set it up. So we grab our Brush tool. And then if we open up our Brushes panel, at the bottom of the presets panel. The Brush Presets, you'll see the Confetti brush that we just defined. Now, as it sits with the default definition, it just keeps repeating that shape over and over, which doesn't look at all like confetti. So, let's switch back over to the Brush panel. And begin adjusting these settings. First of all, on the Brush Tip Shape, the spacing I'm going to crank up to some obnoxious amount like 450%. Around there. The size is too big, needs to be pulled down to about, 50 or so. We'll engage the shape dynamics. The size jitter is set at 100%. Minimum diameter is at 5%. The angle jitter is all the way up at 32, but could even go even higher. Roundness is also in the upper 90s. Minimum roundness is set at 25. And the flip x and flip y jitter are both enabled. We're going to enable the scattering. Scattering is set to both axis, at 1000%. And the count is set at four. And the count jitter is just short of 100%. And then, the color dynamics we will set. Now this is not an often used setting when defining brushes, but it's gonna work well for what we're trying to do here. The check mark for apply per tip is enabled, the foreground background jitter's at 100%, hue jitters at 3%. And once this is all set up, you may wanna create a new brush preset from it. By going to the Brush and Presets panel and just hitting New at the bottom. And this is the Confetti brush. So before we go trying that out, let's make sure we have our colors set as we want. Because remember we enabled that foreground background jitter. So let's set the foreground color to a deep red. Pick it from one of the flags here on the ball. And let's set the background to a midtone gray. And now on this new layer that we have, we can use our new brush to begin painting in some really neat confetti elements. I think that background's a little bit dark there, so I'm going to lighten it up some. There we go. Be gentle with these strokes. It's easy to overdo this. Keep in mind that as you adjust the size of the brush, it also has an impact on the size of the scattering too. I would recommend creating several layers so there's some interweaving of the confetti effect. Here's how mine looks for the final confetti element. I've got one confetti layer that's on top of even the flag ball and then two of them below the ribbon. So next I want to add some of the title next in here. So we'll grab our Text tool and I'm using a font known as Landry because I really like how fun and festive it is. And it has a nice excitement to it in my opinion. So I'm gonna call this Global. Put that as one word on it's own. And then the Cup as another word, or another text layer I should say. I always put my individual text words on their own layers because that really helps me when it comes to the layout of them. I like to be able to grab them together or individually and scale them up. And position them where I want them to be. Now in this case, I'm really making sure to watch out for the title save, because that's why we put that there. And I like to position things around, I like to play with the letter forms. I like to see where they go. I like to line things up and make things look like it's going to work pretty well. And looking at this, it occurs to me, this could look pretty neat if these lines kinda lined up. If I lined up the left edges of the B and the C here. Those letter forms are uniform in width. And then what if I expanded the U out a little bit? And tuck the P over here so that this little chopped out corner would fit around this expected portion in the A. And maybe if I brought up this little bit chip out portion of the L, and then I could tuck some more text in here. Like maybe the year could go in here. These are all just idea that I like to play with when it comes to doing title text, and I don't like to ever really just set text in and let it be. I like to come up with more creative type of approaches to these elements. So, I'm going to move this cup word around a little bit. Until I can maybe get a decent position to begin my more finessing of the text treatment. Like it probably about that. But clearly, I need to work with some of the individual letter forms. And here's an important step. If you want to adjust letter forms within Photoshop, you need to change the text into editable shapes, not editable text. So it will no longer be text, but it will be editable shapes. Before we do that though, I wanna make copies of this. Because once we take that step we won't be able to edit that text anymore as letters. So I've got copies of both these text layers here, I'm going to right click and say convert to shape. So now they've got individual control points as if I would have drawn them with the pen tool or used a custom shape to create them. You can take both of these layers together and you can merge them by pressing Ctrl or Cmd+E. And they will now be merged into a single shape layer. And the good thing about that is that is it now allows us to go in and manipulate the individual little corners. For instance, I really want these letters to line up over here, so I'm gonna drag a guideline in. So that I can grab the C, and move that over to match up to where that B is. I wanna make sure it matches completely. So I'll drag my guideline back over to the other side, and then I can match up the points over there, too. Now I'm moving these points. I'm not just gonna grab the edge here, cuz I wanna maintain the thickness of the letters here. Okay, likewise with bringing down the U. I want to make room for this A. So I'm gonna grab those top two points and bring it down, and maybe grab these hook points. Push them over to make room to reposition the leg of the A, to come down into that gap. And do the same over here with the U. So I adjusted those letters. And I also increased the height of the top of these Ls by moving those points up as well. That's simply so I can put the year in here, as I mentioned before. Let's go ahead and do that. Now I've noticed that the font that I had selected before for the text doesn't have numerical equivalents. So we have to choose a different font to use for the numbers. And I've chosen a font known as Kimberly and I've made the letters white. Because I like the way that that sets off against that black text, although I don't think I'm going to keep the text black. In fact, what I think I'm going to do is go back to my main title text shape and I wanna pull down that fill completely. So it removes those actual fill pixels, but it's going to still allow us to see any layer style. And I'm going to add an Outer Glow. Set it to bright yellow and crank up the size that significantly. Full opacity. Got that size dialed up to 114 pixels. A nice bright yellow with 100% opacity. The spreads at zero. That makes it softer. And that creates a beautiful little, almost stencilled, cut-out effect for our title. Okay. For the sake of time, I've gone ahead and added in the additional info text. Because those are just shapes and regular text on the verses here. I ended up using the exact same layer style as I did for the title. And I used the same font from the title for the England vs Brazil. I didn't really mess with those letter forms at all. I just placed them in there, but I really liked the fun that that font brings. Let's talk briefly about the rounded rectangles I have in there. Just real quick so you can see what those entail. The regular shapes of rounded rectangles that we create with the rounded rectangle tool. I have the stroke at nil and the fill is set to a gradient. And in the fill properties up here is where you can set this gradient. I've got it set from a darker blue to a lighter blue. And the shape itself is set to multiply. And that just adds a nice contrast area for that text to be easily seen over the brightness of that background. All right guys, this is just about done. This composition looks fantastic. You've done a really great job with this. I hope yours looks somewhat similar to this. I'm really pleased with how this one turned out. But before we finish it off, there's one more final little signature move that I always like to do on these types of projects. And that's just a final little bit of polish. Let me show you what that is and see if you agree that it just adds a little extra kick to the design. I like to create a merged layer at the very top of the stack. Again, I hold down the Alt key, we'll go to Layer > Merge Visible. Creates a merged layer here. On this merged layer I like to add a little bit of sharpening. So I'll go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen usually. And I'll just use the default settings. Now that could change according to what your project looks like. I find the default settings work okay for what I like to do here. Cuz then I like to go to Filter > Lens Correction. Custom tab, and add a vignette to it, a darkened vignette. I'm gonna pull it all the way down, so it's nice and dark around those corners, and then change this to soft light. And look how it just makes that whole composition pop. That's what it was before. There's what it looks like after that final move. I really like doing that. To me, that just adds some contrast and some color that just makes the whole thing look done. You may disagree, might be a little bit much for your eye, but I ask you to at least consider doing it. Because I think it's a lot of fun. And that's it for lesson number ten. That's also it for the Sporting Event Flyer design. I hope you guys learned a lot there. I hope that was helpful to you. The next project starts with Lesson 11. We'll look at how to design a concert flyer.