Make Holiday Cards in Photoshop: Funky! | Khara Plicanic | Skillshare
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Make Holiday Cards in Photoshop: Funky!

teacher avatar Khara Plicanic, Photographer, Designer, Adobe Educator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome!

      1:17

    • 2.

      Getting Started

      0:43

    • 3.

      Set Up Your Document

      2:53

    • 4.

      Add Your Image(s)

      6:42

    • 5.

      Special Effects: Stroke & Pattern

      5:34

    • 6.

      Add Your Type

      10:08

    • 7.

      Save Your Work & File Prep

      2:11

    • 8.

      Designing the Backside

      5:50

    • 9.

      Finalizing Your Files

      1:43

    • 10.

      Lab Recommendations & How To

      0:49

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About This Class

DIY your way to holiday cheer—Photoshop style! This beginner-friendly course is part of a 4-course series, each featuring a different design and guiding you step-by-step, from a new blank Photoshop document, all the way to a finished (fully customizable), ready-to-print, holiday card. Use it as is—or as an inspirational starting point!

As you make your way through the course, you'll gain real-world experience in sought after Photoshop skills including:

  • formatting documents for print
  • working with color
  • adding and styling type
  • manipulating layers
  • correctly saving to various file formats
  • adding special effects like pattern overlays
  • and so much more

Everything you need is included: The carefully curated fonts, the pattern files, and illustrations. I'll even share my personal recommendation on where to order your finished cards from. 

All you need to bring to the table are whatever photo(s) you want to include, and access to Photoshop. It doesn't even have to be a current (or even recent) version. Really. Everything this design involves is accessible in pretty much any edition of Photoshop. (Yes, that even includes Photoshop Elements.)

So let's do this. Make your holiday cards something special this year— design them yourself!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Khara Plicanic

Photographer, Designer, Adobe Educator

Top Teacher

A professional photographer and designer for more than 20 years, Khara's a natural born teacher who's been sharing inspiration & know-how with fellow creatives around the world for nearly two decades. Her fun and approachable teaching style has earned her rave reviews on global platforms including CreativeLive and AdobeMax and she's honored to be a regular presenter at CreativePro, Photoshop Virtual Summits, and DesignCuts Live. She's authored several books with Peachpit and Rockynook publishers, been a featured speaker at a local TEDx event, and regularly creates content for CreativePro, PixelU, My Photo Artistic Life, and more.


When Khara's not making futile attempts at reclaiming hard drive space or searching the sofa cushions for a runaway Wacom pen, she can be fo... See full profile

Related Skills

Design Graphic Design
Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome!: their care. And if you ever thought it would be fun to design your own holiday cards and Photoshopped, you were right. I've been teaching Photoshopped and Design for almost 20 years, and this course is part of a beginner friendly Siri's that I created help walking step by step. Four different holiday thin. This particular course will be creating this design right here. You'll find links for free downloads of all the related to mine elements and fun in the included course, along with a link for a free trial of Photoshopped. In case you don't already happened, way go. You'll learn how to build a new document from scratch, how to work with type and what the layers handle is all about. And when we're finished, you'll have a completed design that you can be proud of and a set of files that are ready to send to your favorite lab for printing. And if you don't have a favorite lab, all even walk you through the upload and ordering process at one of my favorite. So gather up your favorite photos, put on some holiday tunes or grab a cup of hot chocolate and let Dio 2. Getting Started: So as I showed you just a moment ago. This is what will be creating. Everything you need is included, so take a moment right now to download the course files, click on all the links and download those files and install the fonts. If you need help installing fonts, you'll also find a link with instructions. How to do that in the course. PdF. You'll find the course files by clicking the Your Project link just below this video and then to the right hand side, you'll see the download link in the next video, we'll get started with photo shop, and mistakes are part of the fun. So when you make one, don't panic. If you need to undo something you've done, just press command or control Z. That's all there is to it. So let's get started. 3. Set Up Your Document: so the first thing we need to do is to create and set up our document. To do that, we're going to come up here to the file menu and choose new and on the screen here. We're going to set up our document to be exactly 5.252 by 5.252 inches and the resolution is going to be 250 and will make sure that we are in RGB color and we'll go ahead and leave our background contents set to White. We'll go ahead and click create, and the next thing that we want to do is put some guides on our documents so we can tell where the trim edge is going to be, and we have some margins that we can keep an eye on to do. That will come up to the view menu, and we're going to choose new guide layout here. We're going to put our first guide at an eighth of an inch, so I have mine already set to that here. But if you don't, you can go ahead and type 0.1 to 5 space i n and type that in for all the top left, bottom and right margins down here. So make sure this area is turned off and there's a check down here next to margin and then you want to enter this number here, and everything else should be unchecked. We'll go ahead and click. OK, so you can see that we have guides now in all of the corners. And we're going to do that one more time. So back to view back Teoh new guide layout. And this time we're going to change it 2.25 inches. So 0.25 I end 0.25 i n and 0.25 I end and we'll click. OK, so what we have now consume in here and hopefully you can see this. What we have now in each of the four corners is we have one set of guides at the eighth of an inch mark and we have another set at the quarter inch mark. So the innermost guide is more just a visual margin that we've created for ourselves. This outer guide is actually where the document if when you actually go to print it, this is what's called the trim edge. So this is where your final piece will actually get cut off. So you want to make sure that all of your artwork like your background color, any images that you want to go to the edge, they need to go. Actually, not just to this edge. They need to extend all the way to the edge edge. So these guides just help us to do that. And now we're ready to add your photo. 4. Add Your Image(s): So now we're ready to add the image. The first thing we need to do is open the image you want to add so you can come up to the file menu and she's open and navigate to the file. I happen to have Bridge open here and I've got the file ready and bridge. So I'm going to just double click from Bridge to bring this image into Photoshopped. Now you can go ahead and place the image in color, but I think the design works best when the image is black and white. And to do that just in sort of a quick and dirty way, I'm gonna come up here to the image, menu and shoes, adjustments de saturate. And now I want to make a quick adjustment to the tonal range of this image a little bit. So I'm going to come back to the image menu, and this time I'm gonna choose adjustments and I'm going to select levels. So don't be too frightened. This is just the history Ram. It's not as scary as it looks. We just have three sliders here, one for shadows, one for mid tones and one for highlights. So in this case, what I want to do is just lighten up these mid tones a little bit. So I'm gonna click on this middle slider and drag it to the left a bit, and you can see that the photos gonna brighten up quite a bit. So when you're happy with it, you just click. OK, next we're gonna copy this image to our paste board, and then we'll paste it into our document. So first thing I need to do is select the image itself, just like in Microsoft Word. You would commander control a tow. Highlight all of your type here in photo shop, we press commander control A and we get marching ants around the border of our image. So that tells me what's going to be selected now to copy it to my clipboard. I will press command or control. See? So it's copied now to switch back to our document up here in the tab area. I'll just click over here to our untitled document. But before we paste it in, we need to define the area where we want the image to appear. We're going to do that by clicking the rectangular marquee tool right here. And then I'm gonna bring my cursor into the space, and I'm going to click and hold my mouse down. Don't let go your mouse also hold down shift. So don't let go of shift and don't let go of your mouth and then just drag out a square. That's something like this, and it doesn't even matter if it's not in the center. We will reposition it in a minute, so just get a square on your page. Something about this relative size. When you're happy with what you've got, go ahead and release your mouse, and now we're going to paste into this square on. We do that by coming to the edit menu, and instead of choosing Paste, we're going to choose Paste Special on will choose Paste into right here and let's talk about what just happened. We see now I just have this gray box here, and yours will obviously look different, depending on your image. But let's take a peek at our layers panel and we see that over here we have are huge image of the images just so large, actually compared to the size of our document that we're only seeing a very small portion of it. It's sort of like we're looking at the image through a window over here, and we have a big, huge image and a relatively small window in the layers panel. Right here we have the window itself or in photo shop speak. This is called the Layer mask. What we need to do before anything is click back to select the image portion of this layer , and we're going to scale it down to fit in the window in a in a better way. So to do that, I'm gonna press commander controlled t to bring up what's called free transform. And we can't even see all the corners of the image because it's so big, it doesn't even fit on our screen. So we need to zoom out a little bit. The easiest way to jump right to being able to see it all is to press command or control and the number zero. So that just zooms us out so we can see here. The image is so big. Now we can see our documents only this big, and our image is this big, so we're going to scale it down by holding the shift. Key and scaling are dragging in words from this corner down here or anyone of your corners and get it something it doesn't have to fit the window. Exactly. So I have a lot of just empty space in this photo. So what I'm gonna do is position. It's something like this so you can scale it down, and then you can just nudge it around and position it within the window so that it's to your liking. I'm gonna zoom back in a little bit by pressing Commander Control. Plus, now that we have scaled the image down so we can see everything and I'm thinking this looks pretty good, So scale it and position it to where you're happy with it. And when you are happy with it, then you go ahead and click the check mark up here in the options bar to set the transformation. Or you can press enter or return on your keyboard. Now, let's talk about getting our window centered in our document. So right now, in the layers panel, we have these two pieces. We have the contents of what we see when we look through the window and we have the window itself. So it actually does matter which one is selected. If the picture is selected and we use our move tool here at the top of the toolbar, we move the picture around. If we have the window selected and we have the move tool, we moved the window around. So if we want to move them together as one unit, we need to click in between and now they're linked. So now the photo moves with the window. What I want to do is center the window in the middle of my document. And actually, to do that, I need to tell Photoshopped that all I care about right now is the window. So I'm gonna unlinked thes and make sure the window here selected. And I can try dragging this around until I get the guides to pop on. But sometimes they're not very cooperative. So I found that the easiest way to do this is to bring up free transform just for a moment by pressing Commander Control T again. Remember, we're on the window here in the layers panel, and now we have the anchor nodes and we have this little center control point. And now when I move it around, you'll see that those smart guides snap right on. And I can see that now. The window itself is centered and the document inside the window, it may be off centered. Maybe that's how you want it. So you can have the document however you want. But now I can see that the window itself is centered. Zain Al. Oh, I'm happy with all of this. I'll go ahead and click this check mark up here and we are ready to roll. 5. Special Effects: Stroke & Pattern: Now we're ready to add the red stroke to the image, so let's head over to our color swatch panel. If you don't see it on your screen already, you can find it by choosing window swatches. So I have mine right here, and this pops up the default collection of swatches. Yours may be displayed slightly different than this, depending what your settings are, but it should look somewhat like this so you can choose any color that you want. If you want to follow along and use the same colors that I've used in the example, here's how you do that. I've created that swatch panel for you. The Swatch collections. You can download that to your computer and save it some place you can find it. And to load it here into your swatches panel, you're just going to click the menu from the Swatch panel menu and then you're gonna choose load swatches, and I will just navigate to wherever you've saved that. And I've called these the funky swatches and it's an adobe Swatch exchange file. Then we'll just click open, and that is the set of swatches right here. So these five swatches or what we're going to be using to create our artwork in this course . So now that we've got those loaded, we can go ahead and add the stroke to this image. So from the bottom of the layers panel, there's this effects button right here. And if we click on that, you'll notice that there's something called Stroke. So stroke is just a fancy design term for outline. So we're gonna click on that. And whatever the default settings are here, where we can change these so we want the size. In this case, at least, I like the size to be right around 20 pixels so you can play with the slider till you get what you like. Or you can just type 20 into the box right here for position. It works best when you are adding a stroke to something with corners. It works. Pesto have it on the inside. Otherwise, you get some funny business happening on the corners. You get these rounded edges, so we're gonna choose inside. I believe the blend mode set to normal the capacity to 100%. And here's where we can change the color. So I'm gonna click. That's watch right there and we get this pop up. This is our color picker. So don't panic when you see this, If you want to just freestyle a color, you can drag the slider around and then choose a shade of your liking. If you know the hex code or RGB or other numerical values for the color that you want to use, you can type it in. Or you can jockey around all of these windows and hover your cursor over here on this swatch, and when you click on it, the eyedropper will sample this color and put it right here. So then you can just click, OK? And OK, all right. And finally, we're ready to add a simple pattern to our background just to add some texture to this piece. To do that, we're going to target the background layer in the layers panel and in order to be able to apply any effects to this layer, we have toe unlock it. So by default, the background layer is locked toe. Unlock it. You can just click right here on the lock in some of the newer versions of photo shop. If you have an older version of photo shop. Then you just double click on this layer. And in the pop up that you get, you just click OK, and same thing. So however you need to do it, unlock this layer on. Then we're gonna go back down to the effects button down here. Click that and we're going to choose pattern overlay and in the window that pops up here. We're gonna talk through these settings, so don't worry if yours is different right here under blend mode, we're gonna set that to normal capacity is going to be 100%. Now, here's where we change the pattern that we want you. So I'm gonna click this drop down and these are the patterns that are set as the default in this version of photo shop. So if I scroll down here, I see this dots one pattern. So I'm going to click on that. If you don't see dots one try coming over here to this little gear icon. Click on that. And if you see this huge some sub menu of all these other preset patterns and you come down here and choose Web patterns, it'll ask you if you wanna replace this? Just go ahead and click. Okay? And then you should see the dots one right here. So go ahead. However, you need to get to it. Go ahead and find dots one, and then we can click that out of the way. Now, here's what's important. These are this dots pattern is a Web pattern. So it's designed with out on a scale that's intended for on screen display. So we definitely don't want to be enlarging it. Teoh a size of 288% because it will look very bad when this is printed. So I'm actually gonna scroll this down. I'm going to set the scale of this pattern to as big as we can make it look for print, which would just be 100%. So it's gonna have a scale of 100% a blend mode of normal in the opacity of 100 and we'll go ahead and click. OK, so wow, look at that. You've added your photo. We've added a stroke and we've added a simple background pattern to give our peace a little bit of texture. Next will be ready to add some type 6. Add Your Type: All right, now we're ready to add type to our image. So first thing is, I'm going to grab the type tool or right here on the toolbar, and I'm going to set my color swatches to their defaults by pressing the letter D on my keyboard. Now I happen to already know the font that I want to use. So before even start typing, I'm going to select it here from the options bar by typing blackout 2 a.m. is the one I want because we've just restored our foreground and background colors to the default of black and white. We're ready to place black type. So I'm gonna position my cursor or somewhere over here and just click once. And then I'm gonna type the message. Happy holidays, exclamation point. And then all set the type by either coming up here to the options bar and clicking the check mark or on my keyboard. I'm gonna press command or control and then hit enter to reposition the type. I'm going to press the letter V on my keyboard to get the move of Ah, tool. Right, these keyboard shortcut. Then I can drag this into ah better location. Now we have a few things to address. You can see that the type of sliding behind the picture and I actually want the type to set on top of the photo. So this is happening because over here in the layers panel, the type layer which photo shop has now created is actually situated underneath our image layer. So to fix that, I'm just going to click and hold here and drag this and release it right here. You see this line that appears this little highlight when I see that highlight, Aiken, drop the layer up there, and then it just will be on top. So we see now that it is actually on top of the image. I also want to scale this. I want this to be large Earth. This type now, because this is vector information. We don't have to worry about resolution and image quality when we scale it. There's a number of ways to do that. The easiest and most convenient after we've already created this whole type player is just use free transform. So I'm gonna press command or control t and then I'm gonna hold shift and just drag outwards from the corner, so I wanted to be just a little bit bigger than the image itself. So if I let go of my mouse, then I can put my cursor in the center here and just drag this around. Maybe about here and now I want to actually rotate this a smidge as well. So to angle, to skew the angle of this, I'm gonna hover my cursor around one of the corners and you'll notice when I have it in the right spot. It changes from this double headed corner arrow to a curved arrow, double headed arrow I called is a macaroni noodle because it's shaped like an elbow macaroni. And when I have this cursor, I can click and actually drag a little bit, too. Just skew this ever so slightly so we don't want it. You know, like that. I think that's a bit much. So I might skew it like like so, And if I want to scale it a little bigger again, I'll hold shift and I'm gonna position it So it's covering the entire top of the frame except, of course, in the space here. So I'm proud. I'm pretty happy with this. So once you're ready, you go ahead and commit the transformation by clicking the check mark or pressing. Enter on your keyboard. Let's add another type layer to the bottom. The easiest way to do that is with the move tool still active. Hold down your fault or option key and then just drag down and it makes a copy of that type player you can see over in the layers panel. We have the happy Holidays layer, and then we have the Happy Holidays copy layer. So we're gonna change the contents of this layer, and we can highlight all of the type very easily by just double clicking the tea. Some nail here in the layers panel and you'll see that that highlights all of our type so we can replace it by simply typing over it now. So here I want to add Merry New Year exclamation point and again set the type by pressing the check mark or hitting. Enter and I'm gonna ask you this the other direction. So Commander controlled t and then hover that cursor outside again. And this one I'm gonna ask you just a little the opposite wave, not an equal amount of skew. I'm going to say less less angle rotation, but still slightly. Okay. And I'll position it about here, and then I'm actually also going to scale it in just a little bit so that it fits and about the same span of space. So when you're happy with it again, check mark or press enter. If you are the type of person that pays a lot of attention to typography, you might want Teoh tighten up the space here between these words. So if that is you, you're gonna make sure you have the type tool active, so you can click it over here. You compressed E on your keyboard to get the type tool. And now, because I have the merry New Year layer active, I'm gonna just click once to insert my cursor in the space between the word Mary and the word new. Then I'm gonna open my character panel. If you don't already have it open, you can fight in under window character, and this allows us to control all kinds of different things. So what I want to control right now is something called Kern ing. So it's the space between characters. So with this cursor inserted here, I'm going to come up to this area of the character panel, and I'm gonna click right on where it says V slash A. I'm gonna click on that and dragged to the left until I get to about minus 200. And if you have a hard time getting precise with that, you can also just type make sure you put a minus in front of it minus 200. And then I'm going to click to put my cursor between new and year and do the same thing. When I'm happy with that, I'll click enter. And now I'm going to target the happy Holidays layer. And again, just click wants to insert my cursor in that space and come back here and type minus 200 again. That just tightens up the spacing a little bit. All right, so I'll commit that. So now we're ready to paint in the color of the letters to do that, I'm gonna close the character panel by clicking this little arrow to collapse that down, and I'm gonna add a new blank layer to my layers panel by clicking the make a new layer button down here at the bottom of the layers panel, and I'm gonna drag this layer beneath both of the type players because we need it to be behind them. And I'm going to press be to get my brush tool. So you want to confirm in your toolbar that it's this tool right here, not one of these other members of the same family, just the regular brush tool and in the options bar, I'm going to select a hard, round brush, and mine happens to have a size of 20 pixels. You can change the size of your brush by using the left or right bracket keys on your keyboard. The right bracket key makes your brush bigger. The left bracket key makes your brush smaller. Those are the keys next to the letter P on your keyboard. So we want a pretty small one in this case, and I'm going to zoom in so I can see you what I'm doing by pressing and holding Commander Control Space bar and then I'm just going to click and drag to the right with my mouse so I can zoom in and see. Okay, now we're ready to paint. So I'm gonna open my swatches panel and I'm gonna use this watches here that I have created for this project and I'm gonna start with red Just click on the red and I've got my brush. I'm just going to start painting, gonna start with the A here. And I don't even have to worry about staying in the lines because the type players are acting sort of like a stencil. So I'm gonna actually paint every other character Red, I'll use my space bar. I'm gonna hold down space bar and drag to scroll over my image. Now, if you make a mistake like I just did hear Oops, I colored outside of the lines. I'll just press e for eraser and then I'll just erase it. And you can change the size of your eraser the same way you change the size of your brush. So left or right, left or right bracket key. You can also come up here and change the size right here or if you need to change the hardness. You can do that here, but we want it to be 100% hard. That's for the brush and for the eraser in this case. So I'm just going to use my keyboard to switch back and forth between the brush and the eraser and to hold down the space bar as I scroll around through this so I won't make you watch the whole thing while I color this in. So I'm going to skip ahead and show you the final result. But whatever kind of pattern you want to use to apply your colors, go ahead and do that. When you get ready to do the bottom word, you'll just scroll down and keep painting down here as well. And when you're done, your image will look something like this. Now, just to make sure we understand what's happening over here in the Layers panel, If I hide the type players by clicking this eyeball off, you'll see that we just have these sloppy little blobs of paint that we painted on the campus. So the type players act like a stencil, and they make are sloppy painting. Look good 7. Save Your Work & File Prep: All right, So now that we are done with the front of the design, we would definitely want to make sure we save this. So we're gonna choose file save, and you can save it wherever you want. Teoh. I'm gonna call it Funky Front and for format. We want to select photo shop and we just hit safe. So this is going to be our working file. So because we saved it as, ah Photoshopped document, it'll keep all of our layers and everything, but we don't want to send the photo stop document to the lab. They won't take it. So we need to save it as a J peg for that. So we'll go back to the file menu and this time will choose save as, and we'll leave just everything the same. But instead of photo shop, we will select J pic, and we're going to see these warnings down here saying, Hey, I can't save layers. We know that it's OK, so we'll hit save. And now we choose R J Peg options. We want the highest quality setting here, so that's gonna be quality of 12 and we'll click. OK, and that's it now we have our saved JPEG. Now we're ready to create the back side of the design. So in the layers panel, I'm actually going to just click the top most layer here, and then I'm gonna hold down, shift and click the layer that's directly on top of the background. So in this case, that's the photo layer of just click here to select all of those layers. So basically, everything except the background layer is selected, and then I'm just going to click and drag these down and drop them in the trash can at the bottom of the layers panel. So this is where we're going to start the design for the other side. But before we do anything else, let's save this now as the backside file so that we don't accidentally overwrite the front so we'll choose file save as, and this time instead of funky front will call it funky, funky back. And we want to choose photo shop for the format so we'll hit save. And now we're ready to design the backside 8. Designing the Backside: to create the design on the back side of the card. We're going to start with the custom shape tool. The shape tools are part of the U families. He compress the letter you on your keyboard to get the shape tools, or you can find them down here on your toolbar. The custom shape tool is nested within this tool family, so you'll want to click and hold. And then from the fly out menu, release your mouth on custom shape. Tool. Once you've got the custom shaped tool selected up here in the options bar, you want to click this drop down right here and you'll see that Photoshopped comes with a preset of shapes that look like this, and you can click on any one of these to select them. But you'll notice that there's no snowflakes here. Toe access all the other shapes. You need to come to this gear and click on the gear, and then down here you're gonna click all and you'll get a pop up that says, Do you want to basically add the other shapes to this, or do you want to just wipe everything and look at all of them? so we'll click OK to do that and then we can scroll through. And what we're looking for is this snowflake right here. If you want to see a larger preview, you can click this gear again. And then she was large thumbnail. Now you have to scroll a little bit further, but this is the one we want, so you can double click it that will select it and close the shape window and then up here in the options bar, we want to make sure that over here on the left, from these three choices, we wanna make sure we've got it set to shape. That'll allow us to add a Phil and stroke. So in this case, will click here to add a Phil. We want to make sure that the fill color is set to black, so you'll click the swatch in them. You can select black down here. We want to make sure that the stroke is set to none. So that's this white outline with a slash through it. So that's right here. Now we're ready to draw the shape some. It doesn't really matter where you position your cursor in this case, because we're going to move it eventually, but I'm just going to click and drag and hold down the shift key. The shift key keeps it from getting squished like this. So we want to keep it proportional and drag something about yea big. And then when you let go, you'll see that it fills with black to reposition. This will press V on the keyboard to get the move of of a tool, and then we can click and drag it around until we see the purple guides pop up toe. Let us know that we've got this centred on our design. If you need to transform this for any reason or you decide you want it bigger or smaller or you want to rotate it or whatever, then you would press commander Control T to bring up free transform. And again, you'd want to just make sure you're holding shift to do that. Now we're ready to add our type, so I'm gonna press t to get the type tool. We want to make sure that our cursor looks like this. So it looks like an open book, and I'm just going to click to insert my cursor and I want to choose for my typeface. I'm gonna select Museo Slab in this case so you can put your cursor up here. And then if you've installed it, you can start typing Maceo and go with Slab. The size doesn't really matter right now or nor does the color. So I'm just going to choose the center paragraph alignment right here and then I'm just gonna turn on my caps lock key and type the parson's I'll hit Thespians bar And then I'm gonna add a vertical divider by holding the shift key and then pressing the backslash key. So on my keyboard, that's the one right below the delete key. And when you hold shift, you get a vertical divider instead. That'll add another space, and I'll type in the year when I'm done with all that all hit the check mark to commit it, switch back to the move tool by pressing V and then all drag it into place here, ish in the center of the screen. Now I want to make this type a little bit smaller, so I'll transform it by pressing commander controlled T. And then I'm gonna hold the shift key and the altar or option key, and then I'm just gonna drag inward from a corner. The shift key keeps it proportional and the option or all to key scales it on both sides, so scaled it into the center. I can switch back to the move tool to just bopping around till I concede that I've got it in the center of my document going to make it a little smaller. Yet there we are. When I'm happy with it all press enter to commit the transformation. And now I'm ready to re colorize this. So I actually want the name here, the Parsons. I want that to be read. So I'm going to switch back to my type tool pressing tea and then I'll just click to insert my cursor onto this line of type and then click and drag to highlight the Parsons. Next, I'm gonna open Thesis watches panel. If you don't see it here on your screen, you can always find it from the window menu by choosing swatches. And then I'm just going to click to select the color that I want right here and you'll see when you can't really see because it's highlighted But if you click toe unhappily that you'll see that the Parsons is now ready. I'm gonna leave the vertical divider, the blue color. But if yours was different for some reason, you would just click to highlight that. Click the book Blue Color right here. And then I'm going to click to highlight the year and come over and click the green in my swatches panel like that, and then I'll click the check. Mark and I can close that panel and that's it. 9. Finalizing Your Files: you are almost at the finish line. But we definitely want to make sure that we save all the work that we've done here. So we've already created thief Funky Back file. So now we can just go to file and hit save to update it to the finished version that will update the PSD file, maintaining all of our layer. So if ever we want to come back and make edits to this, this PSD is the file that we will use. But, of course, to send the file to the lab, they're gonna want a J Peck so again will come back to file and choose save as this time to save our PSD now as a J peg. And we'll make sure that that's the file name I want funky back on down here under format instead of photo shop, I'm going to choose J. Peg. I'm going ignore these warnings. I know that J pegs can't save layers. That's okay in this case and all hit save and then I'll make sure that the quality is set to 12 and click OK, and that's it. We have to files saved for each the front and the back. So for the front side, we have a PSD file and a J peg. And for the back side, we have a PSD file and a J. Peck. So if you ever wanna fix anything or tweet this and use it again next year, you would just want to open up the PSD file to make your changes and then save a J peg that you send to the lab. So once you've saved everything, you are ready to close the file. You could just choose file close, and we can close this one, too. This time, when I hit file close, it's gonna ask me if I want to save the black and white conversion that I've done to this and I don't need to. So I'm gonna say, Don't save and you can give yourself a pat on the back 10. Lab Recommendations & How To: Congratulations. You did it. Now you have a finished design and you're ready. Toe, upload your files to your favorite lab. If you don't have a favorite lab, I always recommend em. Picks dot com to get started with them. Just goto m picks dot com and create your free account. Once you're logged in, look for the D. I Y. Cards link under the Cards menu. There, you'll find a variety of different options, including standards like square, vertical and horizontal. Choose the appropriate option. Select the corresponding size and click toe. Upload your finished design file. Congratulations. You did it. Thank you so much for watching. And please be sure to check out my other holiday design courses right here on skill share and hopefully, I'll see you back here again soon.