Transcripts
1. Introduction: It's time to design some
cool web banners. Let's go. Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a
graphic designer, illustrator, and Adobe
certified instructor. I have worked with companies
like BBC, Disney, Google, Ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best
practices with you. This is a streamlined
hands on course focusing on a real
life design project. I will be walking you through
everything step by step, and you will get all
the exercise files so you can follow along. In case you prefer
not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative
assets provided and create something
completely unique that you can showcase in your
creative portfolio. I am pretty sure
this course will inspire you to create
something amazing. We will start by learning
some important terms of interactive
advertising like CTR, banner mutations,
common aspect ratios, sizes, and preferred
file formats. Then we will jump into
photoshop and put together our first
banner using images, vector shapes, and type. We will repurpose this
first composition for the additional banner
variations and learn to use artboards
and smart objects. Finally, we will create a
dynamic animated banner using Photoshop timeline panel and
the frame animation feature. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic
design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future
creative projects. You can join this course
without any prior knowledge in graphic design illustration
or DOB applications. But to complete the project, you will need access
to DOB Creative Cloud and the desktop or
laptop computer. But now it's time
to start creating, so I will see you
in the next lesson.
2. Web Banners Workflow: We will be producing
some cool web banners. Some of these will be static, but at the end, we will also
create an animated banner. We will start with
our hero image, which is usually the
landscape format. Then we will create mutations from this
because it is very common that you would have to produce different aspect ratio
versions or variations. The second one we create
will be a square format. Then we will also create
a portray format. And then we will prepare three frames for the
animated version. So that's frame
one to and three, which will end up in a separate document where
we will learn how to use the timeline panel and
generate animated gif files. For this project, we will
mainly spend time in photoshop. However, at one point,
we will switch to Illustrator just for creating
a few vector elements that we can then use
in our compositions and to add some flavor
and spice up the banners. Here again, you will
have the option to choose from what images
you want to work with. I chose two of these shots. But if you want,
you can even find completely different
images to work with. Again, you can either
follow me step by step and recreate exactly
the same design or be a bit more creative and experiment and explore
your own ideas. So I hope you are excited to get started because
in the next video, we will put together
first the images and the texts that we will
need for our banners.
3. Preparing Images: I decided to work with these two images and
these two trainers, mainly because I
love their colors. I was especially inspired by the color of the
trainer on the right, and also that nice blue backdrop that we have on that shot, and that I am actually going
to use for my banners. So to begin, we will have
to make a selection of the converse because that we have to separate from
its original background. So I have this image selected, and I go to the Slach menu
and just choose subject. Again, because we have
high contrast difference between the foreground
and background. This is a very quick
and easy selection. And all we have to do
is to turn this into a mask by clicking on
the mask icon here at the bottom of the
layers panel and then turn this whole thing
into a smart object, which will maintain or retain
the original image quality. So let's just convert
this to a smart object. This is especially useful
when you are working on banners because you
end up creating so many different variations
in different sizes, and you don't want to end up
having pixelated details. Once you go back and forth three sizing your image layers. So let's do the same with the other image
here on the right. Again, right click on that and convert it to a smart object. Here, we won't have to make a selection because
I would like to use this lovely drop
shadow that we have on this shot and also
the background color. So now that we have these ready, let's create a new document. And I will set this
up for a web project, so I choose web, which will automatically set up the new
document as an art board. And I will use the
following size. 12 80 by 600. Notice that there is the
little checkbox there for art boards that I
would recommend to keep on for this
particular project. And once we click Create, it will create a new
document for us. Let me just zoom out a bit. And you can already see that
within the layer panel, instead of a background layer, now we have an artboard
one layer group. It is actually slightly
different from a layer group, but you can consider
it similar to that. Currently, we have
nothing in this artboard. So let's bring over the
images that we prepared. First, I'll drop this in here, and we can see
that this is huge, so we will have to
make it smaller. But now I can just close
the original document. And also, I will copy
this smart object. I can even use
commando Control C, and then command or
Control V to paste it in. Let's again, close the
original document. We don't have to save that. And now we can select
these two layers, and with the free
transform tool, which is commando Control T, we can make them smaller. So now I have the NIC on top. But as soon as I move the
converse layer on top, we can see that we actually
have a good selection here. So we will be able to put these two images on
one artboard easily. Now, to avoid having divided
background showing up, I am also going to add a
solid background layer. So this is from the adjustments
option, solid color, and I will click on
the background of the C trainer to sample
that blue color. And this way, we will have an
infinite background color, so we won't be restricted to the edges of
this other image. Now, first of all, I will
make sure that these shoes look realistic in terms of their size compared
to each other, and I will start to
already rotate them. So I think this can
be on an angle, and the converse is actually
already on a fun angle. I'm just going to make
it slightly smaller. And once again, we will learn more about smart
objects later on. But for now, just remember that whenever you work
with smart objects, you don't have to
worry about losing image quality when you
are resizing layers. So, something like
that I feel like will be a nice composition,
quite dynamic. So we have two
contrasting colors, but also contrasting angles, and don't be afraid of cropping into images
in your compositions, whether it's for print or b. If you find the right
place to crop into them, it can make it look
exciting and interesting. Remember, we talked quite a lot about cropping images this week.
4. Preparing Text Elements: Next, let's bring in
the text elements. For that, I am going
to use that font that I included in
the exercise files, and also on the board
with the images. You can find a link
to the original font. So this is the font
called A four speed, and I will just type in big
sale and bring this here. Let's just make this
a little bit smaller. And for now, I'm not going
to set this on an angle. Just keep it straight and duplicate it with
alter option click and drag and type in
on all trainers. This can be smaller. This
is the secondary copy. And for this, I am going to use two new colors
that we can introduce. So first of all, select on
all and change the color to this darker blue or
maybe something from the trainer itself
like this will work. If you want to use the
same exact values, these are the RGB
values, 080361. You can type them
in if you want. Just going to click Okay.
And then for the yellow, I'm going to pick a
very intense yellow. Again, you can see
the values here, 2505, 2502 and zero. We'll click and accept these changes by clicking
on the tick on the top. And last but not least,
we will also need a little sticker
saying up to 50%. So for this first, I'm
going to draw an ellipse. So there's the ellipse tool. And I'm just going to change
the field color to white. We don't need a stroke color, and we have to make sure
that this is set to shape, and then we can just
start drawing and make sure that you hold down the
shift key while drawing. That will make sure
it's a perfect circle. For now, I am just going to
place this somewhere here. And before adding the text, I'm just going to change
the color now to black, and the font or typeface, this time is going to be
de, Italic, 2014 italic. I will also just
reduce the size, maybe to 100 points, and then just click
somewhere here on the Canvas so we can type in up to then press
enter and 50%. And we can't actually see that text, but I
will move it up. And I realized that this is actually not the phone
that I wanted to use. Instead of italic, I want to
use the extra bold italic. This is going to
be more impactful. But the up two doesn't need
to be in all capitals. So I want this to be lower case, which we can get
to by going into the additional character
formatting options by clicking on this icon
here on the options bar, and then remove the all caps
in case you have it on. Additionally, I would like to have less space
between these lines, which we can also find here
in the character panel. So this is called leading, and I'm just going to drag to move them closer to
each other, the two lines. And then I will also make
the up to text smaller. That's the text size to
something like that. And then having all
of the selected, I can align them
to their center. And now we can use
the move tool and just simply with free
transform commando Control T, and then dragging it down, we can align it to
this sticker shape. I will also add a little bit of angle here just to
make it a bit more interesting and also reduce a little bit even more the
space between the two lines. I feel like we can make the
50% a little bit even bigger, but then we will
have to also have a bit more space
between the two lines. Something like that. I
think that looks good. I'm just using the arrow keys on the keyboard
to position this, and then we can even
group these two layers together because we will have to move them
together always. So that's command or Control G, once you have the
two layers selected, and I would just
say 50% sticker. Just to keep things
tidy, before we move on, I will also name
the image layers, so this is going to be
converse, and that's NC. Now we have everything
ready to continue and create some vector elements in illustrator in
the next video.
5. Adding Vector elements: The reason why we need
some vector elements in this composition
is that without them, it feels a little bit empty. There's too much negative
space and not much going on, and to keep things more dynamic, these geometric shapes that
we will create will help to add some momentum and
energy to our banners. Here we are in
illustrator, first of all, I'm just going to use
the line tool and draw a single straight line
holding down the Shift key. And I will increase
the thickness on this maybe to five points, then go to the effect
menu and choose from distort and transform
the feature called zigzag. Every effect that you apply in Illustrator becomes live effect, which means that
you can always come back and make changes
to the settings. So don't worry about setting them exactly the way I do it. You can always come back and experiment and see
what you prefer. But let's just increase
the size a bit here. And then I will also
increase the ridges. Maybe the size can
be slightly less. Let's just add some more
ridges, something like this. I think it looks good. So we can just click Okay, and then let's duplicate this
using the selection tool, alter option, click and drag. And if you have the
appearance panel open, you will see the
zigzag effect there, and this is what I
mean by live effects. You can simply turn it off, and then the line
goes back straight. Once I turn it back on, it goes back into the Zig
zag setup that we created. We can, of course, still change stroke color and thickness
if we wanted to. But for this second version, what I want to do is to go
back to the effect itself, which we can do by clicking on the word Zig zag here in
the appearance panel. And instead of corner, I will set this to smooth, which will create
this nice wavy line. And for this, I'm just going
to adjust things a bit. I will need less ridges here. And maybe increase the
size just slightly, something like that, maybe a
little bit less ridge still. Let's click, and now we have
these two elements ready. It's time to create
a little cross, which we will do, again, by using the line tool. This time, I'm going to
draw a line vertically and increase the thickness to up to maybe around 30 points. And then clicking on
the stroke settings, I will change the
cap to rounded, and then let's create a
copy of this or click and drag and then rotate it while
holding down the shift key, We have now a horizontal
version as well, and then we can align
it to this other shape, so make sure it's
perfectly centered. I just used and relied on the smart guides
to achieve this. Now, let's just make
this slightly smaller. I'm holding down the Shift
key, dragging it down, and maybe also the stroke
size can be smaller, and we will come back
to this shape soon. But I also want to create a Chevron type
element for which, again, I start with
the line tool, draw a straight line, and then switch to the
pen tool by pressing P on the keyboard or clicking on
this icon in the toolbar, and then click here
in the center. Adding an anchor point. Then using the direct
selection tool, we can drag this out and maybe drag it to
somewhere around here. Now, since we have round caps, it would also be good
to have a round joins. I think that looks
much better already. Let's reduce the
thickness on this and then by alt or option
click and dragging, I can create a duplicate, and then pressing commando
Control D a couple of times, we can create some
additional copies. Maybe one less is enough. All right. This is also another element
we will work with. And finally, I am going to
use the ellipse tool and draw a perfect circle by
holding down the Shift key, and then click on
the stroke settings and turn on dashed line option. Here, we can set the
dash to be zero point, and then the gap can be
maybe ten points or more. Now I can see we will
need more space. I can just click in this section where we
specify the size of the gap, and then I can use the up
arrow on the keyboard to increase it and see it live
updating on the shape. I feel like 20 point gap
in this case will work. Now, I am just going to copy this shape with
Commando Control C, and then paste in place
with Commando Control F. These options
you can find here. So this is paste in
front or paste in place, whichever you prefer to use. But then I will also
resize this new copy by holding down lt or option
and shift keys together, and we can make a
smaller circle. Like that. But because we
are transforming this, you have to also make sure that the thickness of the
lines are not changing. This is a setting, you can
find in the transform panel, there you will find scale
strokes and effects, make sure that's turned off. This is something
you can find once again from the transform panel. Just make sure that within that, you have the show options selected to be able to
see these settings. Now that I have this
second version, let's repeat the
last steps again, command C or control C to copy, and then command or control F to paste in place and
then old and shift to drag it down until we have
the next circle ready. And notice that the circles are not aligned perfectly here, and that is because of a setting in the
dashed line feature. We need to switch
to this option, which will align the dashes
to corners and path ends. So once I click on that, it will nicely distribute
them along the circles. So we can again repeat these steps and just
create one more circle. There. Now, if I want
it to be very specific, I could make sure that the distance between
these circles are equal. But for now, I'm just
trying to eyeball it and get it roughly close
to an even spacing, and we have our most complex
element ready as well. But to move on from here, I will actually
create a copy of each of these because I want
to keep an original, which can be edited
easily that has steel stroke settings and the effects available in
the appearance panel. But these in that current state won't transfer well into photo
6. Preparing vector elements for Illustrator: If I select the chevrons, for instance, and I copy them, that's Commando Control C, and then I jump into
Photoshop and use Commando Control
V. Upon pasting, I want to use the
shape layer option, which is the best to work with these simple
vector elements. When I click, it is going to mess up my nice Chevron design. So to avoid having this issue. Here in Illustrator,
I'm going to duplicate this
group of elements, then go to the object
menu and choose Expand. In this dialog box, just click, you don't have to
change any settings. And this second version is now ready to go
into Photoshop. And the reason why
I kept the original because here we still
have the stroke values. So if I want to, I
can always increase, decrease the thickness of these lines and even change
the stroke settings. While these are
now field shapes. So it's much more harder to
make any changes to them. But the advantage
is that if I now copy this and going
to photoshop, upon pasting it
as a shape layer, now it actually shows up the
way we wanted to use it. And the best thing
about having it as a shape layer is
that I can easily change its color by double clicking on the
thumbnail on the layer. And then picking any
color from the design. Let's just make
this smaller with the free transform tool and place it somewhere here
on the side for now, let's jump back to illustrator
and make sure that all the other elements are ready to be moved
into Photoshop. So let's start with
this line here. I'm going to duplicate it auto option drag and then
go to object menu. For this one, first, we need
to use expand appearance because remember the effect is saved into the
appearance panel. But this only
expanded the effect, but it is still a stroke, which we then have
to again expand. Now this is ready
to go to photoshop. So let's copy it and paste
it as a shape layer. I will again, just put it
here on the top for now. Let's repeat the same
for this wavy line. Again, object expand appearance, then object expand and then copy and paste as a shape layer. We can do the same thing
for these circles. Again, I first duplicate it, then go to object
expand appearance. And even though there
was no effect here, we had dash lines, which needed to be expanded this way first and then expand it completely turning this into
a group of small circles. So we won't be able to adjust any stroke
settings anymore. But once again, the advantage
is that we can just copy this and paste
it into photoshop. And then we have a
lovely element ready. We'll keep this here
on the left side. And I actually would like to have another version of this. So I'm going to just
make some space and copy this group one
more time and press Shift X here in
illustrator to swap the field color to become stroke color and maybe increase the
thickness of the strokes, which make this looking
slightly different. But now we can again
move it into photoshop. But remember, before
moving this into photoshop, let's expand this. Once again, you can't have stroke settings going in as
shape layers into photoshop. So now that we've
done the expand, we can paste it in
and it will show up. Exactly how I wanted it. And last but not least, let's also make a copy of this shape here and then
go to object expand. And then let's just create
one more copy of it. Using the Pathfinder panel, we can unite these shapes by
clicking on this icon here. If you don't see the
pathfinder panel, just go to the window menu, you will be able to
open it from there. And then once we
have this version where we united these shapes, we can now press
Shift X to again swap the colors and now we have a stroke size
that we can adjust. I think that looks good. Now again, we can just expand this to make sure we can
move it to photoshop. Let's move this one first, paste it in as a shape layer, and then the last one, again, copy and paste as a shape layer. Now we have all the
elements and there's actually just one element that I can also create here directly within photoshop
very quickly and easily. And as with the ellipse tool, I am going to draw a simple
ring with no field color, just simply white stroke, and I'm just going to
increase the thickness. And I'm just simply
going to draw it here, holding down the shift key, and we can always adjust the stroke size by
dragging this up and down. Probably something like
that's going to work. If you really wanted
to, technically, you could recreate all of these shapes directly
here in photoshop, but it would take much
longer and it would be much harder than to
do it in illustrator. Don't forget that
this is what's going to make you a
professional graphic designer that you are always choosing the most
effective way to create something and you utilize each Adobe application for specific parts of the workflow. Don't worry if you feel
like you won't be able to decide these decisions
on your own and choose the right application
always for the right task because by the end
of this boot cam and after going through
12 big projects, you will have a
much better idea, and you will be much
more confident in deciding when to switch
and to which application. But now that we have all of our elements ready,
in the next video, we can create this
first composition for our landscape banner.
7. Designing the Main banner: It is time to create a high energy
dynamic composition using all of these elements
that we have here. And one technique that
will help you to add more momentum to your design is to utilize some diagonals. So for this, I'm going
to select the text. First of all, both layers, the big sale and the
on all trainers. And using the free
transform tool, I am going to type in
the angle of rotation, which in this case, will be -20, the press enter and enter again to accept
this transformation. We can also select our
V and zigzag lines. And once again, use
free transform tool and type in also -20. By the way, if I
just typed in 20, that would be clockwise rotation while -20 creates counter
clockwise rotation. And you might ask, why did
I decide to use this angle? Well, first of all,
if you have text that's already on
an angle or italic, like this font. It is
usually going to look better going towards the top of your design and
not going down. But even with normal text
that is not set in italic, it always feels a bit
more positive to angle it in this direction compared
to having it the other way. I'm just going to
show you, which feels a little bit negative because the text is declining instead of going nicely upwards. Of course, it really depends on the composition what
you want to achieve. But in this case, I think
this is going to work well. Now, let's make some space. And by the way,
whenever you have the artboard feature active, you can move elements outside of the artboard and still
have access to them. Notice how they are placed also outside of the artboard
here in the layers panel. I quite like to work like this when I have
lots of elements, so we can just
drag these out and bring them back once we know
where we want to place them. So let's just place this zigzag line maybe
somewhere around here. And I'm going to show you
a very handy shortcut. By using the brush tool, I can alter or option click on this color that
we have on the text. Now that it's set as
our foreground color, I can use alter option
backspace to apply that color or feel
that color onto our currently selected
vector shape layer. We can also do feel
with background color, which currently is white. So that is command or
control back space. And with these two shortcuts, it's so fast and easy to quickly change colors
of your layers. Okay. So let's just
use a blue one here. But here we will use
a white version. And first, before we
adjust the other shapes, we just have to make sure that our text is set in
the right place. So we want to make
sure it's legible. I feel like it has good
contrast around here. And I quite like how the shoe lace comes in
between the two words. And then we can have the
on all trainers below it. But it doesn't have
to be this big. I'm going to use the
free transform tool. Just make it a little bit
smaller, something like that. But to create a little
bit more interest, since we have this
as a separate layer, I'm going to put this actually
underneath the converse, which will make it
feel like it came from behind the first line of text, and then it comes in front
of the second line of text. So we are adding some depth and interaction to our elements, which both help to create a more exciting or
engaging composition. And now we can just
move this shape here, and then the zigzag line can come down somewhere here. But this can go behind
the shoe again. Some shapes can be in front, some can be behind. I will also make this
slightly smaller. And then I will again, similarly to the zigzag line, use another copy of the same layer and
just set it to blue. Notice how I keep the higher
contrast details like the white lines closer to
the actual text, the title. The main message, while I use lower contrast details
closer to the edges. This helps to direct the
viewer's eye and make sure that they focus on
the central message, instead of distracting
them and having details competing for their
attention all over the place.
8. Finalising the Main banner: Now, let's move these crosses
onto the composition. I'm going to use one of
these here on the top left. Just going to make this smaller. And here, I don't
mind using a bit of white because this is
a very small detail, and then I am going to
add another one here. This I will set to blue, and I will add another blue
maybe somewhere around here. And then let's bring in this
other version of the cross, which we can paste
maybe somewhere here. Move this line up a bit, can make this slightly smaller. And then let's just
duplicate this once again, move it in here, and we can either set
this also to blue or we can also just reduce its opacity so we
can keep it white. But pressing three or
four on the keyboard, we can reduce the opacity
down quickly to 30 or 40%. Again, this is a way to
play with the contrast. And we just use
this element here more to fill that empty space, but we don't want to
distract the viewer too much from the trainers. And similarly to what
we've done before, let's bring in the
Chevron detail as well. I will just rotate
it 90 degrees down. And place it somewhere up here. Again, using the high contrast
version of it close to the title and really direct the viewer's eye to
the main message. Then duplicating this, I can turn it the
other way around, maybe increase the
size of it a bit, and then we can set this
to the darker blue color, and maybe just move it a
bit further to the edge, and then we can just have
another version of this. Again, rotated, reduced in size and filling
in a shape here. It can even come in front and overlap slightly this trainer. So. Now, let's use
these circles. I'm going to put this
here behind the converse. We'll increase the size of this and reduce the opacity to 30%. And then we can
use the other one here at the bottom right corner. And I will actually
change the color of this to yellow old back space to fill it in quickly
with that color. Finally, we have our circle, which I'm going to place
here at the bottom. Fill this in d blue. But in this case, we
can't use the shortcut. Since this was created here in photoshop and it is using
a stroke attribute, we just have to change the
color from the control bar. And then let's just duplicate
this one more time. Place it somewhere up there. We use the size a bit, and then once again, by using the black arrow tool, we will see the settings
for the colors, and we can change it to yellow. Again, closer to the title, we have the higher
contrast color. While at the bottom, we have
the lower contrast version. And then let's just do one more circle here
on the right as well. I can make it slightly smaller, maybe increase the
thickness of the stroke, set it to white, but then also reduce the
opacity down to 30%. And that is all I wanted to use on this version
of the banner. Let's just take a look at this from a little
bit further away. I feel like maybe this trainer
can be slightly bigger. I'm just going to
increase the size of it. So it fills up that
space a bit more. We can even move it a
little bit that way. And now we can just
move the text as well slightly adjusting to
this new position. And I think it looks good now. So just do wrap this up. I'm going to rename
this artboard and just call it landscape. So now we can save our work. And in the next video, we will create two mutations from this, so we will have a square and a portrait format variation
with the same design.
9. Mutations and aspect ratio: The quickest way to create the duplicate of an artboard is to simply use the move tool and holding down
old or option key, drag it to the side. Notice that this creates a separate artboard here in
the layer spanel as well, and we can rename
this to square. But we have to also change
the size of this banner, which we can do from
the property spanel Here, for the width, I'm going to type in
600 and once I do that, notice how the elements
that don't fit anymore onto the artboard are placed outside both here
in the workspace, but also in the layers panel. And one element
that we definitely don't want to lose
is the sticker, so I'm going to drag that straight back here
on the corner, maybe a bit higher, and also the text we
don't want to lose. But in this case, I don't think
we need both text layers, so all trainers can be removed. And instead, we will be just
concentrating on this one. Big sale. And using
the type tool, I'm going to divide
this into two lines. I feel like that works
really well here. We can make it slightly
smaller and align it in a place where it doesn't
overlap the product too much, and it is still really
good and legible. These shapes, we can
just move here to the top and see whether
we need them or not. Can also just check
in the layers panel, what else we have here. The nC trainer won't be
visible on this version, so we can just delete that
from the square art board. And there is this shape, for instance, which we probably
don't need in this case. I can also delete that. This V line can be
a bit further in or maybe even increased in size
just so it fits better. Then let's just move this shape here, maybe increase
its size a bit. The chevron can come
here pointing at the product and we
can come a little bit further down or even centered. Then this zigzag line, we can move a bit further
away from the product. The other chevron here
can come up as well. This circle can go down a bit, and maybe we can have one
of these shapes here. And just to have a little bit of yellow as well in
the composition, I'm just going to place that
circle up there on the top. Maybe make this
slightly smaller. Okay, I am happy with this, so we can just delete the shapes that we
didn't end up using. And now we can just duplicate this square banner to
create our third version, which is going to be the
portray banner size, and to have this set
up the right way, I'm again going to use
the properties panel. And for this, the
width is going to be 400 and the height
is going to be 800. So it's a two by
one aspect ratio, which is going to
allow us to have, again, both trainers visible. So first of all, let's just move the converse here to the left, reduce the size a bit. And this time, I'm actually
going to have the sticker go underneath the converse shoe and place it somewhere
around there.
10. Additional aspect ratio versions : And this reminds me of
one thing that we missed, and that is a drop
shadow for the converse. So we have a shadow
on the NIC trainer. We need to match that for
this other shoe as well. So let's just come back
to our main composition. And by the way, I'm using Commando Control click to
switch between layers. That is because I'm not using
the auto select feature. I prefer to use it
with this shortcut. So with that, I can very quickly switch between not only layers, but even different layers
in different artboards. But by having this selected, I can double click
near the name of the layer and apply drop shadow, and you can copy the settings
that you see on my screen. So I'm using multiply
a darker blue color, similar to the shadow color of this other trainer and with the rest of the settings
that you can see here. It is good to know whenever
you set up your drop shadow, you can always just click and drag it around on the canvas. But this time, I'm just going
to keep it where it was, making sure that it is the
same angle as the other shoe. We can be slightly
further to the right. Let's click. And then
we can make sure that this drop shadow is applied on the other
artboards as well. And the quickest way
to do that is by right clicking on the layer and choosing copy layer style. Then commando Control click on the other image layer and
right click paste layer style. And once again on this one
as well, paste layer style. So you can see why this shadow is helping to establish
or create more depth and make this whole
composition of the sticker being underneath
the shoe more interesting. Of course, I still want to
make sure that it is legible, so I just move it slightly down. But then let's just copy
this layer with the nk. I selected it and then
press commando Control C, then come back to this artboard. I just select one of the
layers and then press Commando Control V. That way, I bring it into
this composition. And I will move
this all the way at the bottom and maybe place
it somewhere down here, and we can just tidy things up. This circle can be removed. This chevron, we
can also remove. And instead, I'm just
going to increase the size of this shoe and maybe
move it up slightly. This one can be also
slightly bigger. I don't mind it overlapping
a bit more here. And also, I don't want it to be exactly touching the
bottom edge of the frame. This is what I would
normally call tangent or kissing when the
edges meet exactly, so it's always better
to crop a bit more into it or make sure that you
don't align it to the edge, and I want it to also
overlap there on the top. Yeah, I think that
works quite nicely. And then we can just move these shapes further
to the left a bit. Of course, we need
our big sale text that can be also slightly
larger in this format, fits quite nicely up here. And then let's move these
distracting elements like the zigzag line
out of the way. It can come up
somewhere here, maybe. This other zigzag line can be down here. This
chevron line here can be maybe underneath
the sticker, so it doesn't compete with it. We can place this cross
here at the bottom. Maybe reduce it down to 30%. This small cross can
be up somewhere there. We can also have a
darker one maybe here, and then maybe we can place this circle here in the corner. Okay, I think that looks good. But the best thing about having all of these
three variations in the same photoshop
document is that we can always come back and
make small adjustments, move things around, borrow
elements from one version, move it quickly to the
other and vice versa. So working with
artboards is definitely a huge advantage
when it comes to creating banners and the
different mutations. But now in the next video, we will create a variation
of the square format, which can be used as
an animated banner.
11. Designing the Frames for the Animated Banner: So to start off, I'm going to duplicate our original
square format, which creates a new artboard, and we can just rename
this one frame one. And the main thing I
want to change here is that we only need
the first word big. And since we only have one word, we can make it slightly bigger. Have it maybe somewhere
around there. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time here
moving things around. Instead, I'm just
going to duplicate this and create
frame number two, which will have the
other trainers. So I'm going to remove the
converse and paste in the nk. This time, I'm going to
rotate it in the other angle. Just fits better in the
square format like this, and having the text going in the other way creates
an interesting dynamic. So I will just type in sale using the same
size for the text. And then I just move these
other elements around, make sure that they are
not in the same place. Otherwise, it would feel
a little bit static. We can even borrow some of these other layers
like this one. Just make sure it
goes further down in the layer structure and maybe
also reduce its opacity. Let's just move this chevron
away from here as well. And as I said, making
sure that we don't have the elements in
the same exact place. This can be probably white and maybe just
place it down here. Let's move this one down, maybe increase the size, and then maybe we can just move this other circle up here
to fill in that space, and that way we can just move this one maybe further up a bit. Now notice that the only
element that I kept in the same exact place is the sticker and
that's intentional. I want to make sure that's consistent throughout
at least two frames of the whole animation because
there is a key message and I want to make sure it gets
through to the viewer. But now we can create
the third frame. So once again, I'll
just duplicate this, rename this to frame three. And here, we can move
the n trainer down. I'll just turn it in
the other direction, reduce its size, place
it somewhere down there. Then we can bring a version of the converse and
reduce its size again, place it somewhere here
on the top right corner. First, actually, I'm going to move the shapes out as well. So I just tie the up a bit before we place the
image in there. Okay. Now we can move it back. I literally just
want the heel and the shoe lace to show and
a little bit of the logo. That's just hinting
what brand this is. And then we can
type big back here. So we have big sale. And this time, we will
actually have space for the rest of the
copy as well to show, which we can borrow from
this main composition. So I will just select that text. By Commando control clicking on it and Commando
Control C to copy. Come back here and click on
this Canvas or artboard. And then commando Control
V to paste the text in. We can divide this
into two lines as well and place it
somewhere here. Now, here, the sticker
can be removed. I will actually delete it. And instead, I am going
to make this text bigger and even the big
cell can be larger. This last frame is
really about the text. And again, I don't want to have any elements that are exactly in the same position as
on the previous artboard. So I am going to make
sure that we move things around to make the
animation more interesting. So this cross has to go somewhere else as
well, maybe up here. We can have this wavy
line maybe down here, and instead of having the
zigzag in the same position, I will just move that up
here and switch it to the blue color by using the alter option
backspace command. And then this circle
can be removed. I don't think we actually
need it in this case. Maybe just bring back
this circle from the other composition and paste that somewhere
in the corner here. And lastly, maybe this one
can come here as well. Okay, so now these
excess shapes, we can just delete
from the layer spanel. And if we zoom out, we can now see the three frames
side by side. I feel like it's going to work really well as an animation. So it will have a clear message, big sale up to 50%, and then the final frame just puts the whole
sentence together, a big sale on all trainers.
12. Turning Frames to Smart Objects: Whenever I create
animated banners, I always like to keep the general color of each
frame fairly similar. Because otherwise, you
might end up creating too much fleshy
transitions between them. So imagine if I had one
frame with blue background, the next one white, and then the third one yellow, it could be a very
attention seeking banner. While this will be
a bit more subtle, but still interesting
to look at. Of course, this is always something you have to
discuss with the client, they might want to go for that more fleshy look
for their banners. But now that we have
the three frames ready, there's one more thing
we need to do here, and that is to turn these
into smart objects. This is just going
to make it easier to move them onto a
separate document, because even though we design
them in the same document, to be able to export them
as an animated banner, it will have to be
in another document. So let's just do this now. I will rightly con frame one
and convert to smart object, do the same thing for frame two, and also do the same
for frame three. Now, let's create that
new document file new, and I'm going to set this
up as 600 by 600 pixels. This time, I don't need
the artboards option. I have that turned off,
and then I create it. Now, going back to the
previous document, I can select frame one, first, copy it Commando Control C, jump to this document
and then paste with Commando Control V
as our frame one. Now we can even delete
the background layer, just select it and
press back space. Then again, jump back here, copy frame number two, paste, and then copy frame
number three and paste. And let's not forget to
save this document as well. I'm going to call
it animated banner.
13. Export options: Now, it's final time to
create our animation, for which we are going to
open the timeline panel, and within that, choose the frame animation option
and click on the button. This is going to create
a frame by default, but we can go to the panel menu and choose make
frames from layers. This way, we will have each of our layers set up as
frames straight away, and we can use the shift key
to select all three of them, so we can change the duration of all of them to
maybe 1 second. But then selectively,
I'm going to change the third
one to 2 seconds. Now, if we have the loop
option set to forever, that means it's going to
keep repeating itself, which is perfect for us. So let's just test this out. I'm going to play it. I
feel like the 1 second might be a little
bit too fast at the beginning for the
first two frames. So to slow things down a bit, I can choose other
and maybe set this to 1.5 also other 1.5.
Now, let's test it out. Yeah, I think this is a
little bit better already. Yeah, I think that works. So now that we have
our timeline set up, we just need to go
to the file menu and choose port, save for web. And here, from the presets, make sure you choose gif
hundred and 28 dirt. This is going to give you the best quality animated banner. But it's also going to produce
the highest file size. You can always see
the final size here on the bottom left. So this is 187 kilobytes, which is considered
quite high for a banner. Ideally, you want
to keep it around 50 K max 100 k. Again, it depends on the client and their specifications or the partner sites
that they work with. So the way you can always reduce the file size is to
adjust the settings here. Increasing things
like the loss option is going to reduce the
quality of your frames. But in turn it will also
reduce the file size. Another option that
you can use to reduce file size is
the amount of colors. So if you reduce that
down to, let's say, 64, now we are already down
to 100 k. Of course, it's always worth
checking all the frames just to make sure that
they look acceptable. I think they look okay. But I am going to actually go back to the high
quality setting, So I remove the loss feature
and I go up to 128 colors. I could even go to 256 colors, but that will make the
file size even larger. But just for the
demonstration, now, I'm going to use this
maximum quality, and I will click Save and
save it to my project folder. So here is the animated banner. We can just have a look
at the gift file that we saved from photoshop. I
think it looks great. And now let's not forget to also save out the static
banners as well, for which I'm going to jump back to the original document. And I'm going to
go to Pi Manu and choose port Export as this time, which will give me the option to export all three
artboards individually. Notice that the smart objects
we have at the bottom, which we use for our frames
for the animated banner don't even show up here anymore because they are
not on artboards. But these we can all select and change at the
same time to JPEG, which is the recommended file
format for static banners. Or optionally, you
can also use PNG. And again, you will
see the respective file sizes here
on the left side. Once again, if you
can keep these closer to 50 to 100 k,
that's more ideal. Currently, they
are all too large. So we will have to do
something about it. And one useful feature in
case you're working with PNG is to turn on the
smaller file feature. This is not going to affect
the quality too much, but it definitely made
the file sizes smaller. I'm just going to
export them like this. Again, we can take a look
at these exported PNGs. So here's the landscape version, there is the portray version, and there is the square. Now, there's one
additional option worth mentioning in the export
as dialogue book, and that is the scale
feature, which by default, we'll export with
the current size that you set for your artboards. But in case you need
to create versions for maybe retina screens, and you need to export
these twice as big. Then you can easily do
that by clicking on the plus sign and changing
the size two times two. This way, because we have three images and two
different sizes, it would be a batch
export of six images. But since we already created
the original size versions, we can just remove that and keep the double sized versions, which one cyclick export and choose the destination
will be generated as well with the file names showing that these are the
double size versions. So for instance, with
the square size, we have the original and we have the larger high
resolution version. And this is why it was so
important to work with the vector shapes and also high resolution smart
object image layers. So it allows us to easily export double or even triple the
original size of the banners. And that pretty much sums up everything that you
need to know about producing both static
and animated banners using a combination of
photoshop and illustrator.
14. Conclusion: Well done for
finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as
I had recording it. And of course, don't forget
about the class project. Because remember,
practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you
like this course, and you would like to
learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that
you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet
you in the next one.
Martin Perhiniak, Graphic Designer, Illustrator & Educator
