Creating Effective Magazine Ads: Key Design Techniques in Photoshop

Over a few videos I'm going to show you how to design a magazine ad, and even if you're not designing something for print, the graphics concepts that we're going to be learning of how to do various design elements, they can be useful for anything. So that this happens to be a magazine ad is not the super central thing, but we're going to learn some interesting things along the way as far as different design elements and things, and then we're going to take this and put it into a mock-up so that it looks like it's actually in a magazine. So let's first create a file that is appropriate for our use.

If this is a magazine ad it's going to be in an 8.5 × 11 magazine. I want to create a new file either by clicking new file or file new,  and this is going to be for print. So I go over here to print, and there is actually an 8.5 × 11 preset that I can choose.

Let's just double check the settings. It is 8.5 × 11 inches,  it is 300 pixels per inch, and as we are designing those, since this is going to be for print,  I would want to go to CMYK, because we're going to be printing this. But if you were doing this for some sort of web graphic or something, you could also go to web, which would be kind of for digital, put in whatever pixel dimensions you want, and work in RGB.

But I'm going to go to print and work in CMYK, 8.5 × 11. The background will be black because we're primarily working with a dark image that we're going to put on this black background, and technically it'll be covered so it doesn't really matter too much. But those settings look good, so I'll go ahead and hit create, and now I've got the right resolution and right size for me to bring my graphic in.

So this could be my first step is to place in an image, and I want to size it and crop it in here,  and because I will be sizing and cropping, I want to definitely place it in as a smart object. So I retain all of the original pixels that are in my image here. So I'll bring in my model image here, and I want to make it bigger.

As long as this link is checked on here, then I can grab any side. I do not need to hold shift to keep it proportional, and I can scale this and make this the size that I want, kind of filling this space here. If I want to zoom out a little bit and kind of get it to be the size that I want it to be in the cropping that I would like it to be, and let's somewhere about like that.

Now I want to put on some type on top of this, and we're going to have, it's going to say vibe going across. I'm going to use my type tool here and click, type in vibe, and I'm going to make this a lot bigger. So I'm going to select this.

I'm going to center it. Now that just chooses to center on the spot, but I actually need to center it in the document. I could do that by dragging, and if smart guides are enabled, which they currently are not, then it would help me snap there.

I could turn smart guides back on, and then that will snap to the middle when I get there. All right, so there's kind of snapping to the middle, but maybe I don't want to bother trying to line that up. I can use my alignment options up here, but do you notice they're grayed out? That is because I don't have a selection.

If I do a select all, then as long as I make my move tool, notice that these light up, and I can say put on the left of the selection,  center of the selection, right of the selection, centered vertically if I want to. So this allows you to center or align to a selection, which also means that if you select a specific area, let's say you select the face, and then you're in your move tool, whatever your layer is that's selected,  you can center it within that selection, which is actually pretty cool. So I'm going to do a select all and center it horizontally so it's centered that way.

Then I'll get rid of my selection and I'm going to drag down holding shift so it stays in that straight direction. I'm going to go to my type tool here so I can see my type options, and I'm just going to move this out of the way here so I can focus on my type. And because that's being centered there, when I go and increase the size, notice how it remains centered, although it doesn't remain vertically centered in that spot,  but it does remain horizontally centered.

Notice that I'm dragging over the icon. So while you can go into the menu and choose things, I like to scrub left and right over the icons. Anytime you hover over an icon and you see that hand with the arrows, you can scrub over these values.

This does not work in all Adobe apps, but it does work in things like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It doesn't work in all of the other ones like InDesign. It doesn't work in although that would be nice.

Before I finalize the size enough here, I need to choose the typeface that I want to use. I want Arial Narrow, and I want the bold version of this. Now if you don't have Arial Narrow, you can choose any sort of condensed typeface here, or technically you could do anything you want.

It is your design that you're creating here technically, but if you're trying to recreate the vibe that we're going for here, you can follow along with our kind of design choices here. I'm going to make this a bit bigger like so. I can use my move tool here to slide it down,  holding shift, to again make sure it stays on that same vertical line.

Let me go back into my type tool. For any additional settings, let's say I select this here, I can go into my character and paragraph panels by clicking this toggle button here, or by choosing window, and then going into character or paragraph down here. I could do things like if I want to track out the type,  or track it in to add spacing between all of those characters, I could change that.

Zero would be no extra space removed or added. Also there's the individual space between the letters,  so for example here the B and the I, the I and the B, that is called kerning. The metrics kerning here is the default for a typeface, so if a typeface has good kerning space between these characters, the individual space between certain pairs like a B and an E, a V and an I, the built-in font metrics could be good if it's a well-designed typeface.

Now if you don't think that that's a good spacing, you can try optical and Photoshop will guess what it thinks based on the visuals of the type, what it thinks looks good. I don't just automatically choose it, I only choose that if a font does not have good built-in metrics, but if it's a well-designed typeface, the metrics should be good. In this case it's pretty similar, maybe optical is just a little bit better.

I actually would like to put a little more space between the V and the I, so I'm going to go there and just increase that space just a smidgen right there. So individual kerning pairs to adjust how much space is between individual letters, that's done through the kerning amount. The overall, when you select a lot of stuff, this is adding an even amount of space when you're tracking here, that's adding equal amounts of space across all the letters.

So I think I'll just leave that at zero. Then I also want to change the color, so I can click on the color up here or color over here, or I can also click on color down here. All of those are the same kind of color swatch that I can click on,  and I could either sample color from the image if there was color, I can choose a color here,  and then choose the vibrancy or darkness of the color over here.

I can also enter in color,  so if there's a specific color that the client has requested, maybe there's a certain brand color or something, for in this case we're going to use B79EE9, so this is their kind of corporate color. We're going to choose this and go ahead and hit okay, but of course you can mix up your own colors there. Now to make this a lot more interesting, I can do things with various effects.

So let's say I want to add a stroke to this. I can go down here to my effects button and I can choose stroke,  and I'm going to zoom in on this so I can see this better, like so. By default, this is a solid black stroke and I can't really see it very well, of course, on this dark background.

You can choose solid colors, gradients, so if I want to change the color, I can click on this and change the color,  but I want to do something more interesting. I want to choose a gradient here. So going across here,  we've got these various different colors that we can choose from.

So you can choose a preset that's kind of close to what you want, and you can make this bigger. There are lots of different ones that are in here that you can choose from, and I want this kind of pinks and purples here to start with,  which is kind of closer to what I want. I'm going to choose this, like this fourth one here.

I think it's pretty good. Now I can change the angle here, so this is going from the blue to the purple,  so from blue to purple, and I'm going to make this bigger so we can see it. Now notice that this is on the inside of the type.

I want that to be on the outside of the type, and generally speaking,  that's how you're typically going to want your stroke, because if you have it on the inside,  it's going to kind of distort your letter forms because your letters kind of look like whatever is left over, and that generally doesn't look very good. So usually better to put that on the outside so you see your stroke outside, and that way you have nice clean formed letters, and notice the blue to purple going blue. I didn't mean to click on that.

Be careful clicking on that. When you're choosing this, make sure you click on that little teeny arrow. Don't click on there.

That'll open up your editor. We'll actually come back to that in a moment. Make sure you click on the little arrow to choose your gradient.

Okay, so it's going from blue to purple from left to right here with this angle, so you can change, of course, that angle like so. If you want to make it transition faster, so you're going from blue to purple much quicker, you can reduce the scale. If you increase it, it takes a lot longer to go from blue to purple, but I'm just going to keep it on the default 100%, and if I want to customize this, this preset here is pretty good.

It's a nice start, but let's say I want to change this. I can edit this. What I did accidentally just a moment ago by clicking here, you can do intentionally clicking on this, and then you can edit this.

So this is starting with a preset, and you can start with any preset you want here,  and I'm starting here with this fourth one right here. Down on the bottom, these are our colors. On the top is our opacity.

Let's start with our colors. If I want to edit this color right here,  I can double click on it, and I can choose any color I want, or I can enter in a specific color if the client has a specific color palette. For example, I want E9, A5, A5.

This is one of the colors that this client uses. Then over here on the right, I want to change this color as well. I can double click on that, and I'm going to go with AE, A2, DB.

Kind of a light purple. All right, so kind of like this, but I want another color, and this preset didn't have a third color, but you can add as many colors as you want here. If I click to add a color,  I can then double click to change what that color is.

Again, you can click to add a color,  and then double click to change that color, and you can go from one color to another to another. Now, if you accidentally add a color and you realize you don't like it later on, you want to just delete it, drag it off, and it gets rid of it. We can also move this color along to change how much of one versus the other it has.

Also, between two colors is the transition of do you want more of the one color to the right, or do you want more of the color to the left. Normally, that location would be a 50, so down here you can change that, so it's exactly equal,  so it's 50% of the way from one color to the other. These are called our color stops.

Also,  this as well, if I want to put that exactly in the middle, I can put that at 50. So, this one is starting over here at zero. This goes to 50, like a 50%, and this goes to 100, as in 100%.

This middle color here, I'm going to double click on that and change that color to 65C0E0. Okay, so these are three colors that are in the color palette of this client,  and I'm kind of liking the transition there. Now, I do think I'm going to come back to this because I'm working with this client quite a bit, so I can, if I want to, save this as a preset.

I could just hit okay to use this, but I want to create a new preset, so I'm going to call this vibe because that's the client here that I'm working with. New, so that creates a new preset down here, and this is stored in Photoshop, available for all files that I work on,  and now I can come back to that later. All right, so notice down in here, now it's now a preset,  so even if I switch over to another one and I want to go back, I can always go back to that gradient and I have that available, not just in this file, but all files.

Oh, there was one other thing that I wanted to do that I forgot. Let me go back in there. I'm going to click on this to edit it.

I also wanted it to fade out and kind of become a little bit transparent, so these top things, these are opacity stops as opposed to color stops on the bottom,  so if I choose this one on the top right, if I lower the opacity, look at how it's becoming more transparent as it goes over to the right, so the one on the left is at 100 opacity,  so we see it. The one on the right, I don't want that color to disappear completely,  because then I don't see the color at all, but I do want it to become a little bit see-through,  because I like some of the transparency effect here, so maybe somewhere around here,  so they kind of, I notice it more here, it's a bit brighter, and then it kind of,  as we read from left to right, kind of starts to become transparent as it goes to the right. Okay, I like that, so I'm going to hit okay.

I can also set the size of this stroke,  like so, and let's say I think that looks good. Okay, now when we have an effect like this,  we have two different opacities, and when you go to opacity, you can click the little arrow,  and you can drag through the slider. You can also just go to the name and drag left and right,  and it's like you're dragging through the slider.

Get that little scrubbable value. Opacity is the entire layer's opacity. That is your fill and your effect, so as I lower this down, eventually I'm going to get to seeing nothing.

I have no fill and no effect, but fill opacity is just the fill, this solid color fill, not any of the effects, so if I lower down the fill opacity, notice I keep the stroke effect. Even if I eventually get rid of all the fill,  I'm still left with the stroke. That's actually a pretty cool thing, so you can have it be 100%,  you can have it be transparent a little bit, so you can have a little bit of that kind of ghosted effect, or you can get rid of it entirely, and you still keep your effect, so this is fill only opacity, not effects, whereas opacity is like saying fill and effect opacity.

That means that if you don't have an effect, you will not see a difference between these two opacities. You must have an effect for fill to look different. That's why we use that fill opacity.

Alright, so I like that effect that I've got there, but I want to go a little bit further. I want to add another effect. I can go back down here to add an effect, or if I double click on effects, I go back into the effect dialog here, and I can also add things from here as well.

I want to add an outer glow, so I'm going to go here to outer glow. Don't just check the checkbox, because here's the thing. With whatever you have selected, you're going to see the options for that selection.

You can turn things on or off without seeing the options for those things. Make sure you click on the name to see the options for that, so you can select something and see the options. Even if it's turned off, you're still seeing the stroke options, so make sure that we go to the outer glow by clicking on the name, and then making sure that it's turned on.

In here, normally, let's hit reset to default here. The default settings are that it uses basically like a white glow, and I want to choose a color glow, so I'm going to choose this solid color here, and I'm going to click on that solid color, and I can choose a particular color here. I'm not really seeing it much here, probably because the size just isn't big enough, and I need to make that a bit bigger here.

There we go, so if I go back here, and let me click on that and go back to white, so here's what it looks like as white, and I can play with this size, which is like a softness, and I've got an opacity here, but I want to change this from white. I want to click on this, and I want to choose a kind of pinkish kind of color that goes with the vibe of the rest of this, so kind of pinkish purple. I can try different colors here to see what I think is nice, and when I change this size, it's like a softness.

When we think about size, what it does is it normally goes from a gradient of kind of the color to transparency, so like let's say 100% transparent, or whatever this current opacity is. It's kind of like the max opacity that you see, all the way fading to nothing, and the bigger the size,  the bigger that transition area. Now spread can push out the darker part, whatever this opacity is.

It can push that out and spread it out, so you see more of that, which means that eventually, if you spread this out enough, you spread that out throughout all of that size area, really leaving no leftover space for that transition, so you want to make sure you don't put that spread out too far, but if you don't see enough of that darker color, you might want to push up that spread just a little bit to see more of that kind of darker opacity color. Okay, now for more creative effects with glows, you can also change the contour. Now this is another thing where I'm going to click the arrow, not click on the thumbnail, because that brings up the editor.

Generally in Adobe interfaces, clicking on the thumbnail brings up the editor, clicking on the arrow brings up the list of presets, and there are various presets here for how it goes between transparent and visible, so if we think about that opacity there as kind of our max opacity,  we can go from zero up to that, so if this is a linear transition, it's going from basically that max opacity, 71 percent to zero, just in a straight linear line, but if we go from zero up to that 71 percent and then back down, we go from clear to visible to clear, or we go from visible to clear to visible, and so there's different ramps that you can do. Do you see more of the visible before it goes invisible? So these are all different aesthetic, like oh that's kind of interesting,  right, if you want more kind of zebra striping, but you can play with these to get different feels. I can push out this spread a little bit, maybe reduce the size,  right, and so this kind of creates like almost like a glowing outline, which is kind of cool,  right, and then I can control the opacity of this.

The beauty of all of this here when I hit okay is that this is all editable. I can go back in and make changes if I need to change, you know,  the text. I can add and remove from the text, so all of this is live editable effects that we can create here in Photoshop.

So this is going to be the first part of this multi-series of videos,  and we're going to stop with this, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do some more in the next video, but to get started, do exercise 6b.