Transcripts
1. Award Badge and Ribbon Designs in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class award badge and ribbon designs in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're making award badges and ribbons in Photoshop. We're going to make a ribbon and a few varieties of the award badge. You're going to see how you can save various project elements so that you can reuse them later on. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making a ribbon and varieties of award badges in Photoshop.
2. Create an Award Banner and Ribbon - Part 1: We're going to start by creating a document the size of the shape that we want to create. I'm making mine 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. But if you want your final version to be larger than this, you should start with that size now because it's harder to scale things up successfully in Photoshop and we're not doing the shapes here. I'm going to flip white to my foreground color here. I'm just going to fill this background layer in this document with white by pressing "Alt+Backspace+Delete." I'm going to add a new layer, and I'm just going to lock this bottom layer down. That just means that it's not going to move. It's going to be a little bit easier for you to say how I'm working if I've got a white background. I'm also going to press "Control or Command+0" just to scale this up. We're going to start by creating our ribbon. For this we want the rectangle shaped tool. I want to create a shape, so I've got shapes selected here. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll have three icons there to choose from. I want it to be filled with blue. Let's actually go and get the blue that we want. I'm going to just drag out a rectangle that is as wide as I want my ribbon to be. I'm thinking that this is a pretty good size, it might not be in the exact right place, but it's a pretty good size for my ribbon. In the last pallet, I want to keep a duplicate of this, so I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the New Layer icon and turn the visibility of the original one off so that we're just working with this copy one here. I want to warp it, so I'm going to choose "Edit" and then "Transform" and then "Warp." Now, if you get to the stage where you select this, so it's got marching ends around it you'll find that those tools are not available. You can't do this with the marching ends. What you'll need to do is if you see the marching ends just choose, select and then they select. You then just want to click on this layer's name, not the thumbnail, but the layer name itself and make sure that you've got the Move Tool selected and that just makes sure it's got this set of handles around it, which is fine for choosing edit, transform warp. We want to use the flag warp here. If you don't see these tools up here, click on this icon here because what that does is shows and hides the warp tools and you want the warp tools and you want the flag. We're using the default settings here, a band of 50 percent, zero horizontal, zero vertical, click the "Check" mark. Now I've got my bendy ribbon. But in an upcoming video, I want to show you how you can create text on a path. If we want to add text along this ribbon, it would behave as to save this path so that we would be able to use it and we don't have to re-create it. Let's go and see how we would save a path. I'm going to select on the Shape Layer here, and I'm going to open up the Paths pallet, so that's this one here. If you can't say the Paths palette choose, "Window" and then "Paths." In the Paths palette, you will have a path for this layer. What you want to do to save it is to just double-click on the "Path Name" and rename it. I've named mine, "Ribbon Path" and I'll click "Okay." What happens is I get a path called the Ribbon Path and also the original path that went with this shape. It's exactly what I want. Now I'm going to go to my rectangle copy here. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to rasterize it because I've now got the bits that I need from it. I'm also going to add a brand new layer to this document. I'm going to turn off my flag shape so that all I'm seeing now is this save path. It saved as a box shape, it would be more sensible for me to just save it as a single line. We're going to do that now. I'm going to the Direct Selection tool here, this white arrow tool. I'm going to drag over these two lines, the vertical one and the beginning of the bottom curved line. I'm just going to press "Delete" on my keyboard, then I'm going to drag over this anchor point here, incorporating this vertical line and I'll press "Delete." What that leaves me with is just the flag shape, just this path that I can later use to put text on. It's all I need to do, but right now this path is going to get in my way because I've created it. I don't really want to say it anymore. So to stop saying it, I'm just going to click here on this "Create New Path" icon. This ribbon path's still here. It's going to be saved in the file, but it's now not in my phase. Let's just hide that and let's go back to our ribbon. We've got our bendy bit, now we want the tiles. So we're going back to this rectangle shape. I'm going to right-click it and choose "Rasterize Layer." I also want to recolor it, so I'm going to click here on this icon to lock the pixels on this layer. I'm going to choose a slightly darker blue. I'm then going to press "Alt+Backspace+Delete" to fill it with my slightly darker blue. Now I can unlock the pixels by clicking this icon again, and you can see the lock disappears. I only want a bit of this line, so I'm going to Rectangular Marquee tool. I'm just going to drag across here and press "Delete" to remove the bit I don't want and press "Control or Command+D" to deselect the selection. I want to cut a little piece out of the end of this shape. Again, I'm going back to my Rectangular Marquee tool and I'm going to hold "Shift" as I drag out a small square. Select "Transform Selection," this allows me to transform the selection. It's really important that you choose that because you can't transform your selection otherwise, I'm just going to type 45 in here for 45 degrees. I'm not going to click the "Check Marquee" because I'm just going to move this down into position. We can do all things with a selection marquee if we choose this Transform Selection option. When we're done, click the "Check Mark" and that just puts the selection where you put it at the angle you chose. I'm going to press "Delete" to delete the piece out of the tile of my ribbon, and then "Control or Command+D" to deselect the selection. I made two of these, so I'm going to drag it onto the New Layer icon, and I'm going to drag this one away and hold "Shift" as I rotate it 180 degrees. Okay. Now we've got our pieces together. Let's go and get our original flag piece, and then we're going to grab these pieces and just put them into position. It's a pretty good position for that. Let's go and find a position for this one. The final thing we need to do is to create a shadow for these ribbons. To do this, we need to be at the top here on a new layer. If you don't already have a new layer, make sure you create one and start working up here. You don't want to be working further down the document or disaster will strike as you'll create something you won't be able to see it. You can believe me because I've been doing that all afternoon. Let's go on and see if we can do it a little more successfully this time. I'm going to choose a darker color. This is going to be my shadow area. I'm going to zoom in here, I can hold the space-bar as I have the Zoom tool selected to turn the mouse pointer into a hand so I can just move things into position. Now I'm going to the Pen tool and I know lots of people really hate the Pen tool, but this is not a very big Pen tool job, it is pretty easy. The first thing you're going to do is just click once at the very top point in the band on this ribbon, so just click once, and then up here you're going to click and hold the left mouse button down and drag. So I'm going to click and drag just in an upwards direction here. You just want a shallow curve there. This is going to happen. Just ignore it, that's perfectly alright. Now hold "Alt or Option" on the Mac until your mouse pointer turns into a little bent line. You're going to hover over this point here and then click and drag it down. It needs to be perfectly vertical. Then going to come and click underneath it, click again and click once more, just to make it back to your starting point. This is the shadow piece, it's just on a layer above the ribbon. If we drag and drop it below the ribbon, you can say it's getting cut off by the ribbon. It's going to create a perfect shadow endpoint for our ribbon. I'm going to hold the space-bar, just move everything over, create a new layer. Let's go to the top and just make sure that we're consistent here, that we're creating our shape up the very top. Again, with the Pen tool shape selected, this time we're going to click here, at this point, the bottom-most point in our bent ribbon. We're going out here, and this is the point at which we're going to click and drag. I'm going to click with the left mouse button and then drag. We just want a nice little bendy bit here. That's a pretty good shape. Let go the left mouse button. This is perfect. When you say this, you know, you've got everything right. Hold the "Alt or Option" key on the Mac until you see this bent arrow pointer on your mouse and still holding the Alt or Option key, just swing it around so it's perfectly vertical. When it is vertical, let go the left mouse button, left go the Alt or Option+K. Now you can just click, click, click back to where you came from. Click, click, click. Again, this shape is above the ribbon. That's why it's showing as a larger shape. Let's just drop it beneath the ribbon and it's going to look perfect. I'm going to press "Control or Command+0" just to zoom back out. Now we have our ribbon shape. In the next video, we're going to start working on our badges.
3. Create an Award Banner and Ribbon - Part 2: Now that you've created your ribbon, it's time to just organize your file a little bit and what I'd like to do is to just put the shapes in pairs. So this is the shadow and the ribbon tile over here on the right-hand side, and you could even type RHS shadow in RHS tile. I'll do the same for the left-hand side paces. I'll make sure that my shapes are all rasterized. So I'm going to right-click and choose Rasterize Layer for each of these. Now I'm going to put all four of these into their own groups. I'm going to select them and then Control or Command, click on the "Group" icon and that just packages them into a group. We're going to call this Ribbon back. I'm going to create a new group here, drop this rectangle in it and call it Ribbon front. Of course in the Paths pallet, we've got our ribbon path, so that we could put text on this ribbon at a later date. At this point, if you want to be able to use this ribbon over and over again, you could go ahead and save the file as a PSD file. I've already gone ahead and done that so I'm just going to re-save it at this point. The reason why we put the Ribbon back and the Ribbon front in separate groups is that we're going to draw our award badge in between the two of them. So it's going to be in front of the back shapes and behind this ribbon shape, and then it's going to be perfectly positioned. So let's go ahead and see how we do that now.
4. Create an Award Banner and Ribbon - Part 3: To create my banner award image, I'm going to click on the "Ribbon back" group and click to add a new layer between the two groups. I'm going to the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to click and drag, holding the "Shift" key, to just work out how big my circle needs to be. I can move it by holding the "Space bar" down. This is a pretty good size relative to the ribbon for me to be working in. I'm on a brand new layer. I've already selected a color to use, a sort of lighter blue color, so I'm going to press "Alt+Backspace (Option+Delete on the Mac)" to fill my circle with that color. I'm going to choose Select, Deselect. Now it's going to be easy for me to work on this shape if I don't have the ribbon visible, so I'm going to turn off the visibility icons here for the Ribbon. I'm going to focus on this shape here. I'm going to get the Move tool and I'm going to use the smart guides to center it in the document. Now if you're smart guides aren't working, this is the process that you can use. Make sure to Control or Command, click on the layer thumbnail so you get these matching ends. Then press "Control" or "Command A" and that will display these icons here. You want to click here unaligned vertical centers and here unaligned horizontal centers. So that's how you center things, if the smart guides just fail to work for you. Then you'll press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. I'm going to add a new layer here because I want to start an element. I'm going to add scalloped edges all the way around the circle. I'm going back to my Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to hold "Shift" as I drag out a circular shape. Got a new layer and I'm going to press "Alt+Backspace(Option+Delete)" to fill it with the same color as the circle is. Now, I'm going to move this into position. What I want it to be is centered right on top of this circle, so I'm using a smart guides to line it up. Now with it's still selected and the Move tool selected, I'm going to focus on this little indicator right in the middle of the shape because that's its rotation point. I'm going to click and drag it out of the shape. As soon as I drag it out of the shape, these values here become accessible to me. Because my document was 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size, half of that is 500 and 500. If I tap 500 and 500, this little marker here is right in the middle of the document, so it's now my rotation point. I'm going to rotate this. Well, I'm going to try ten degrees. Ten looks like it's going to be pretty good. I'm just hitting ten degrees here and I'm clicking the "Check mark". Now I'm going to hold down "Control+Alt+Shift" on the PC. That's Command+Option+Shift on the Mac. I'm just going to tap the "Letter T". I'm going to continue to do so until I get all the way around the edge of my shape. Then I can just click another tool to stop this and press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. What I've got here is a circular shape on one layer and these nice little curvy edges on another. If I want to, I can merge these two layers together, but what I'm going to do before I do that is I'm actually going to make a duplicate of them, just in case I want to do something different with them. On one set, I'm going to merge them. I'm just going to choose Merge Layers. I'm going to call this scallop edge. I have a scalloped edge shape, but I also have the scallops by themselves and the circle by itself. Well, let's see what we could do here. I'm going to target the scallop layer, and I'm going to lock the pixels on it. Now I'm going to fill it with a different color. I'm going to select a color that with similar sort of value, and it's my foreground color, so I'll press "Alt+Backspace(Option+Delete) to fill it with this different color. What we've done when we've recolored our scalloped edges and actual fact recolored all these circles that we rotated around the shape. Well, let's go and unlock those pixels again. Let's move the shape below the circle. This gives us a different effect. In this instance, we've got a different colored scalloped edge. We've got a circle on one layer and a scalloped edge behind it on another layer. That's another effect that we can use, but it's important not to be too enthusiastic about merging layers because sometimes you forgot opportunities for using the various bits for different effect.
5. Create an Award Banner and Ribbon - Part 4: Now that we know how to get a scalloped edge around our shape, I'm just going to turn the visibility of this layer off. Going back to my original layer, I'm going to add a new empty layer above it. I'm going to drag out a triangle, but I'm going to do this using the custom shape tool. Let's go into the Custom shapes and I'm going to select this triangle here. If you're not seeing it in your shapes collection, click the Fly-out menu, click "All", and then choose Append, which will append the all shapes collection to the end of the shapes that you have visible, that will protect any shapes that you've created yourself from being deleted, so you just click "Append". I've got my triangle, so I don't need to do that. I'm just going to click "Cancel". I'm going to click away from this. I'm going to choose Pixels, because I just want filled pixels here. I'm going to hold Shift as I drag out a triangle. Now it's filled with the blue color I was using. You could fill it with any color including the color of the circle. I'm going to move it into position, so again, it's centered over the circle. Because I'm just looking for that smart guide to appear. I'm going to move its rotation point out of the way and then come up here into the Tool Options bar and type my 500, and 500 is my rotation point. Then this time I'm going to choose a bigger angle. I'm going to type 15 degrees for my rotation and click the "Check mark". Again, Control Alt Shift T, Command Option Shift T on the Mac, to go all the way around the edge of the circle. I'm using angles like 10, 15, 30, anything that divides evenly into 360 and doesn't leave anything left over. Now this time I've managed to do it so that all of these shapes on separate layers. I'm just going to click on the topmost layer, go down and find the bottom one, Shift, click on it. So that's all of these little triangles. I'm going to right-click and choose Merge layers. I have all these triangles on a single layer. I'm going to take this shape and I'm going to drag and drop it onto the New Layer icon. I've got two copies of this circle of triangles. I'm going to lock the pixels on this layer, and I'm going to go and sample the blue color that I was using earlier. Then as it's my foreground color, I've got my locked pixel layer selected here. I'm going to press Alt Backspace option Delete to re-color this set of triangles the same color as the circle. Now let's unlock that, and let's drag these two copies of the triangles below the circle layer. I'm going to locate one of these circles. It doesn't matter which set of circles of triangles I select. It will be centered over the middle of my circle, so I'm going to choose Edit, Free Transform, and I'm just going to rotate this half of the number of degrees I used to create it. When I created this set of triangles, I rotated them 15 degrees. Half of that is 7.5 degrees. That just offsets these shapes from the original, so I get this different effect. Now if I wanted to save this as a shape, things are becoming a little confusing in the last pallet at this point. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a group and I'm going to drop into that group the things that belong to a particular shape. I want the blue triangles, I want the purple triangles, and I want a duplicate of this circle. I'm going to drag and drop it onto the New Layer icon and just drag one of them into this group. I could go ahead and label this group, zigzag edges. You can see that the entire shape is now in a group all by itself. As soon as the last pallet starts to look a little bit complex, it might be a good idea to go and put things in groups. I'm going to grab this one here, the scallop edge one, create a group and drop it in there. We're just going to make this scallop edge. Close up the group, so that's tucked away and turn its visibility off. Now, we've got these spaces. I'm going to turn the zigzag off. Here is our multicolored scallop. So we could go ahead, select both of these and put them in a group.
6. Create an Award Banner and Ribbon - Part 5: At this point, you might also want to create some stroke circles that you could use. I'm going to add a new layer here. I'm going back to my Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to drag out a circle and just position it where I would want to create a stroke circle. I'm going to fill it with something. It doesn't matter what I fill it with so I'm just going to choose a color I'm not using elsewhere in the document. Alt Backspace option Delete. Having filled it, is now easy for me to see where it is and I can make sure it's centered. If it's not centering on the smart guides, I could go ahead and do that little technique I used earlier for centering it, but this is nicely centered. Now I'm going to put a stroke line on here. I'm going to the FX icon and I'm going to choose Stroke. I'm using this tool because it allows me to eyeball what the stroke is going to be. I'm going to make it a narrow stroke so I think about three pixels is fine. It's on the center of the shape and it's white in color, but you can click on the color picker here and choose any color you like. I'm going to click, Okay. Now we've got our nice stroke, but we've also got a really revolting colored circle here. To get rid of the color, I'm just going to drag the fill to zero on the shape and that gives me a stroke, but no fill. Now that's a technique that you can use in any version of Photoshop. If you're working on a lighter version of Photoshop, you could create a circular shape using the Ellipse tool, you're going to set it as a shape layer and then you can set it to no fill and a stroke of your choice, the color of your choice, and also the width of your choice. I'm going to do another three-pixel stroke here this time using a shape to do it. I'm going to hold the Shift key down as I drag out an ellipse. I'm going to hold the space bar just to position it roughly where I want it to be. I want it little bit closer to this original circle. So let's go and grab that. Moving into position I want to center it using Smart Guides. If you're working with a lighter version of Photoshop, you could use unfilled shapes that have strokes around them to create your lines. If you're working with earlier versions, I suggest you use this approach and just add a stroke to an unfilled shape. Well you're going to fill up big and set the fill to zero percent and of course, once you've created these objects, they can be used with any of your circle so just bought back a different shape here and here's another shape. Now we can't use it right now with the scallop edge because the scallop edge is higher up in the last palette than this. So what we might do with these two is grabbed them, Control or Command, click on the New Group icon, name the group lines and then just make sure that it's dragged above any of the shapes, but below the ribbon. Let's now go and get our scallop edge back again and turn the others off. Now the last thing we need to do is to work with our ribbon. I'm going to bring back the ribbon front and the ribbon back. The shape is an actual fact in a perfect position for using with this ribbon. But if it were not, then we could go to the ribbon front to select it and then Control click on the ribbon back to select it. So you've got both parts of the ribbon selected, and now it's easy to move the entire ribbon up or down the document. But you will want to select both pieces and move them together because you don't want your shadows to move out of position. I'm just going to click a tool to turn this off. We can go to any one of our shapes by just clicking on the group for that shape. Let's go back to this one. Your project for this class is going to be to create a ribbon and also two or three of these award shapes. Choose a patent that you like around the edge and add a few lines to them as well. Make sure that your ribbon is broken in two pieces, a front piece and a back piece so that you can put your shape in the middle. Post an image of your ribbon and your final shape in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and you've learned something about creating ribbons and award badges in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.