*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Good morning. Happy Thursday, everybody. We are here designing posters in Adobe Part Two of a two day series.
Yesterday we made a motivational poster. We're gonna do another one of them today, and that will just get our creative juices flowing so everybody can follow along just to learn some basic, basic, basic tools. And then we're gonna get into some really cool, interesting stuff.
I know yesterday we wanted to do a synthwave poster, I think Chat was wanting, and then some other stuff. I think somebody asked for fantasy as well. So we're going to do a series of Avatar the Last Airbender posters that are very minimal.
So it's going to be a really exciting, fun time. Hey, Tim. Hey, Sam.
Hey, Sean. Hey, Shauna. Hello, RB.
Hello, Mitchell. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chat today.
Hope you guys slept well. You guys are ready, you got your coffee. Depending on where you are in the world, maybe you're winding down for the evening.
Welcome. We're going to have a lot of fun today, but before we start it, I want you guys to come on over to my Behance. Well, just behance in general.
If you're on YouTube and chatting there, come on over to Behance. Be part of the Chat, be part of the community. We're going to design together real time, incorporating your feedback, doing some really cool stuff.
I love seeing what you guys are thinking. Alicia, how are you? If you guys haven't followed Alicia or Shauna, they're both incredible streamers. They do some really cool stuff.
Shauna does the drawing and illustration work and Alicia does papercraft. It's really kind of a cool kind of bespoke, very different creative process. It's really, really fun.
She's really talented. So definitely check everybody out. They're in chat.
Go click on their profiles, give them a follow. I am over here if you want to go. Follow me.
Alex Lazaris on Behance. You can see some of the work that we've done before on Adobe Live. The Ghost Pepper project, the Sorba project, the goats and boats project with Voodoo Val, and the design Face Off, which she's going to be doing again today, this afternoon.
So definitely check it out. I know we want to talk about some synthwave stuff. Here's some work we did with signal noise.
I'll bring this up again later. Definitely follow James White. He's kind of the godfather of synthwave, so I'm going to try to pay homage to him without ruining his kind of defined aesthetic.
But for this afternoon, for posters. So it's going to be a great day. Hope you guys are really excited.
If you want to follow my design firm online, wearelazaris.com. You can kind of check out stuff in there. So, yeah, let's crack into it.
So, got photoshop open. Here's where we started from yesterday. We got this hang in there, cat meme motivational poster.
We got this kind of, like, Swissy style poster with this Porsche 911. We got, like, an architecture poster. Got some abstract stuff.
We got a little kind of, I guess you would say, like an Adobe Live Chat poster as well with some of the great guests that we have in Chat today or yesterday. And we're going to kind of flash this out even more. So just to get everybody back on the same page, if you haven't used artboards before, you can go to New and then just click that artboards tab right there in the top middle section.
That way you automatically start with one. If you don't do that though, and you just start with a poster. We're just starting with 24 x 36 for our dimensions and a resolution of 72.
I know it's not print ready, but we're making so many posters, I don't want to slow down my computer by having 300 DPI for print. Oh, neonoir. Nice synth wave work.
Love it. I have a feeling that you would. That's awesome.
So if you do start it without an artboard, you can always go up here to the move tool in your top left of your bar and then oops, grab the artboard tool. And then you could just make an artboard by dragging it over your kind of canvas. And then now you have artboards.
So really simple. If you didn't start your design file with an artboard, you can add it in and you can just duplicate it by pressing the plus sign. Or if you have it open and you have files and you want to do a test and you have files on there, but you don't want to start over, but you want to do a couple little quick edits.
And I'll show you how to do this with the sky is back. Welcome, sky. Welcome, welcome.
How you doing, Tom? So, yeah, if you want to just duplicate everything on your artboard, just press Command J and oops, sorry, you have to go up to the artboard itself to click the title of it Command J and it'll duplicate the artboard completely. So we'll show you how to do that again later on in the stream when we're doing the Avatar posters. We're going to start your creative juices off in the morning with a little design challenge of just making another motivational poster.
But this time we are going to flip it. So I'm going to click this corner and I'm just going to go up here to the top. If you can see my mouse up here at the top.
And then it's going to rotate it to horizontal versus portrait. And I went to Hi from South Africa. Welcome, welcome.
Hello from Portland, Oregon. If you go to Adobe Stock, there's a lot of really great assets on there for you to grab. So I ended up just buying or licensing a image because every motivational poster needs a great stock photo that's very corporate to get you motivated to do your job right.
So we're going to go super corporate today. I'm going to put in a layer background. I'm going to go to the bottom right corner and I'm going to actually click the solid color background and I'm going to make a black because I think every good motivational poster seems to be black.
We're going to crop it down. Just saw your Behance in your Arpet candle. It's genius.
Thank you. Thank you. It was a lot of fun to make that.
It's really hard to shoot your armpit and a candle and get in position correctly to do your own self portrait. Warning, if you don't like Armpits, don't click on my Armpit candle project. Just warning, I'm not going to show it on stream because I don't want anybody to not have a great morning.
All right, so I'm just actually just selecting what I want to mask, and what I'm going to do here is go down to the masking tool and just mask that. Ah, yes. Corporate life.
So good. So motivational. I'm feeling better already.
What about you? Chat? Hi from Jamaica. Welcome. All right, I know these typically use like a serif typeface, and since I'm just feeling so corporate this morning, I'm just going to do Times New Roman.
And really what I wanted to capture with this image was Chat and me making work together. So I'm just going to write teamwork. Since we're collaborative, I couldn't do my work today without you guys in Chat.
So thank you for helping me and being my inspiration and my art director. Without you all, I'd be lonely and just not as creative. So thank you for tuning in, helping me do better work.
Question is, do we do all caps? What do you think Chat do? Do you all caps? Hi from the UK. Welcome. That's what they say.
Tim work it's. Tim work, tim work. Do we do all caps or no, not all caps.
I have my keyboard actually on all caps. If you are unfamiliar with the type tool inside of Photoshop, you actually have a lot of really great options. So if you don't want to do all caps on your keyboard, which is kind of a pain, because then you have to go back in and type things out.
You can actually just go right here to the all caps button and click that and it will just turn all the selected text into a full caps word. So we got that. Let me shrink this down just a little bit there's.
Also, I feel like when you see these, they typically have like a frame around them. Octavio. Hello.
Hello. Welcome. I want to work there, says Sean.
You too can work here. All right, let's see here. I've got this.
I think that's probably good enough. All right, so I don't want it filled. I'm going to do a no fill on the fill.
So what I did was I went to the Shape Tool. Let me actually just step that back again really quickly. All right, go down to the shape tool, the shape marquee in the corner, the rectangle tool.
And then I just actually just kind of just drag my rectangle tool around and I clicked it and then it's trying to fill it again. Go up top, click, no fill. And then stroke.
I'm going to do white. I feel like they do, like, a weird blue. Sorry, Chad.
I guess I should have done more research on which blues and which things make motivational posters. Oh, stroke. Increase it to probably four.
I do stroke four. All right, let's go. Just I'm going to drag it, but I'm going to hold down my shift key so that I break the what is it called, the technical word? It's the linked, I guess, sizing dimensions.
But I'm just going to break that so I can get this place correctly. I'm going to move this to the middle. Octobia says, love to see your work from the SoBro tequila.
That was awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, we did that on Adobe Live many, many moons ago.
I think almost like a year and a half ago. That was a lot of fun. But yeah, if you haven't seen those streams, you could go back and watch the whole process.
It's linked in that project itself. You can go check it out. All right, I'm going to throw in a little bit of subtext.
Now I'm going to just drag and make a text box that fits this space. And I'm going to lower the typeface size down to, like, 72. And then I'm going to not do all caps for it and do thank you.
Wow, I can't type. Thank you, Chat, for all your hard work and ideas. Boop.
I'm actually going to just going to shrink this down a little bit more, and then I'm going to drag this to the middle. And then I'm going to make sure that teamwork is also centered because it doesn't look like it is. Boom.
Look at that. Look at that. Would you just look at it? That's so beautiful.
Now constrained. Yeah. Thank you, Jerry.
Constrained. That's the words. Yep.
Good job, Chat. Thank you. See, this is why I need you.
Constrained is the correct words. All right, so now we got two beautiful motivational posters to get us started. And now we're going to start building out our avatar posters.
I'm going to just let us start to do avatar posters and then we'll get into the synth wave one because that's going to be a little bit more, how do you say? Just like it's going to require more work. So I want to make sure that we have at least four posters done, then the synth wave one, and then however you guys want to do about it, we can absolutely make some really cool stuff. So I'm going to go down here, I'm going to grab this artboard.
I'm going to press command J, and I'm just going to drag it down because I want this to feel like its own little separate section. And I'm just going to work on this one artboard first, and then I will duplicate it and then just change out type words. And then I'll be a really quick way of spinning up a series of posters.
So if you have an event or anything like that, it's great. Krishna says Alex, are you talking over how to make mood boards? I'm not talking over specifically how to make mood boards, but mood boards find things and use them as inspiration, but don't steal things. Blaze chat.
Don't steal things. Mood boards. Behance has a really great tool on mood boards.
You can literally go into your behance, you can go to somebody's project, save a piece. Like, I have an illustration, one that I just love these illustration pieces. This is such a great way of going back and referencing artists and styles that you like.
You can go and click on it, and it'll bring up their whole Behance project. So you don't have to just save one image or you don't have to save all of them. You can go back to the project, see it in full context on Behance.
That's my favorite mood board right now. I used to use things like Pinterest or Dropmark. What other tools did I use? Or just like saving folders worth of creative inspiration.
But the problem with that for me, I found was trying to save a reference link or a website URL, stuff like that. It was really hard to do for folders of inspiration pieces. So I would just use behance.
Behance has a lot of great creatives on it. You'll find anything you want to see there. So just make your mood boards every single day.
It seems like Behance is getting better and better, so definitely leverage all the tools. Discover is also awesome. It shows you the things that would work with what you're following or what you're researching at that time.
So lately I've been doing a lot of poster research, and so now it's recommending a bunch of posters to me, which is super helpful for projects. So leverage these tools available to you. And then if you need to do a mood board for a client presentation stuff, just think about how you can leverage hierarchy and grid systems to kind of lay out the images.
So maybe another stream will do like a mood board thing. But right now we're just kind of keeping it a little bit more Photoshop friendly right now. All right, so I got this artboard here.
What I want to do is start pulling in some stock photos. So I went to unsplash. I got some really cool things.
Chat if you have watched the avatar The Last Airbender, what are your favorite? I guess bendings. If you could bend an element, which element would you be? I'm going to start with Earth, but what I want to do is do something like this. Maybe I have to think about it as, like this is going to be a template for the rest of the pieces, too, so I don't want to get too too big with the image.
All right. I'm going to do a background image as well, or a solid color. So I grabbed unsplash.
You've never seen Avatar? Shauna what? Oh, my goodness. Hello. Antonia? Yeah.
You need to see Avatar. I mean, it's good. Why wouldn't you watch it? It's good.
What else are you going to watch? During COVID we've all seen everything already, so definitely check it out. It's really good. It's cute.
I'm getting my way through Legend of Korra now, so that's exciting. All right, so I've got this nice brown. It kind of complements these rocks.
We might change it out later on, probably. Water is rad. Water is very cool.
I don't know which typeface I'm going to use yet, so I'm thinking, let's see, I might go back to doing, like, Helvetica, but maybe not. So what I'm just doing here is trying to build out a system that I think would scale well with type. I'm also going to left align that.
I'm going to bring it down. I've also grabbed some icons from thennownproject.com you can get some really nice iconography there.
Depending on what you're using them for, you either need to get the professional license or the personal licenses, and each one of those kind of comes with its own kind of constraints. Sarah just finished that one. Yeah.
Earth bending would be cool. Bit of my motivation. Could be just a good start.
Okay. See here. Not sure how I'm liking this typeface.
I feel like it's so stretched out. It's weird how sometimes when you're looking at typefaces, like, I know I spell Earth correctly, but when you look at it in a certain typeface, it sometimes feels wrong. Now I'm looking at I'm just like, is that how you spell Earth? It's kind of weird.
Sometimes you just get asset fatigue, and you're just like, I think that's wrong now, so that's fun to think about. Yeah. Mark Bowden you should do a watch party some night.
That's a great idea, guys. All right, so I've got Earth. What are some lorm ipsum things for Avatar? Earth bending.
Earth bending is one of the building arts. I'm just going to grab this copy from this fandom website. My favorite is when that looks like it's spelled incorrectly.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It looks like it's spelled incorrectly right now. It's weird to me.
Let's see. I'm going to drop this down to 72 again. Might be smaller.
I need something that's a little bit more condensed. So maybe I'll just do Helvetica here just for the normal type. It's not that much more condensed.
I'm going to take off all caps. Hello. What I don't understand why is it not.
I've got the type bonding box, but it's not following. Oh, got it. Ha.
It was going beyond the level. All right, I had the letting incorrect. All right, let's lower this down even more.
I kind of want this to just be like a subtle thing. We'll play with that layout in a SEC. I've got these little icons that I want to also incorporate.
Let me just move this over here. I'm going to move this over and also just decrease the line height probably 36. I might need to just go up a little bit.
All right, that might work for right now. I'm going to grab so in Illustrator. I've got these kind of shapes already grabbed.
Put this in here. Just make it a smart object just so I can bend it around and make it ha. Bend it around.
Get it. I'm going to move it around just in case I do need to change anything. It will scale for us nicely.
Do a color overlay. Bring in some of this Earth. What did you do just now when you had the issue? Alex I had an issue where I had the line height was too high.
It was at like 700, so I couldn't see it because it was going beyond the bounding box that I had set. So it just kind of was hiding. And I thought that it was broken horizontally like an Excel document.
But really it just was going down just way too far, so I couldn't see it. So what I did was I just lowered the line height and then it was fine. So definitely look at your line heights whenever you see issues with your paragraph.
I don't really like this icon. In a perfect world, I would probably figure out a different in a perfect world, what I would want is to have all these icons be similar line weight, similar styles and things like that, but just based off of time. We don't have that much time today.
We only have another hour almost. So we're just trying to crank through it. I'm just going to use what we have.
I'm not going to rebuild icons. You could do that on another Illustrator stream or something like that. But we're just going to leverage this as what we got.
So I think that's okay for right now. Let me see what else I can do with it. Hmm.
We're gonna move these download. Maybe this needs to go back up. Let's see here, bossing.
Say let's go over here. And then we're going to grab this Earth type. I'm just going to press Command J to duplicate it.
I'm going to drag it down and go, boop, bossing. Se, which is the impenetrable fortresscity in Avatar, the last Airbender. I'm just going to pull this down.
The hierarchy is now wrong and weird, so I'm actually just going to bring this and then just do maybe it's light. No, that's weird. Maybe it's okay.
Maybe this all needs to be scaled up. There's really no wrong answers when you're working with these posters. It's really what feels right for you, especially because this is all self initiated.
We can spend as long as we want on them or as short as we want on them, but I want to get you guys started on other things. So just going to leave like that. Maybe I need to move this down a little bit.
I know I'm like getting really fussy with it. We'll see what it actually needs in a second. Yeah, you're right.
It does look wrong. Yeah, I'm just seeing Alex's armpit candle. Yeah.
Yeah. Welcome to getting up close and personal with my armpit. Yeah.
Personal projects, like Alicia said, are the best, but they're also frustrating because you can spend as much time as you want on them, and that gets tough. You got to manage your time correctly, and sometimes you spend too much time on things. That's not actually bad.
It's kind of nice. Maybe I need to do one little design element. Maybe it's like just a number one out of four, and I'll do fluoro is the typeface I'm using.
And then I'm going to bump it up and then maybe I'll bring it down. I think I want a space there and a space there. Maybe I'll just lower the spacing between these two just to get that four closer.
It's all right. Still a little big, but whatever. I don't know.
We'll see as a series and see what we want to change on there. Anna says, wow, it's so simple, but so nice. Moving the copy really did the trick.
Thank you. Yeah, it's like a little training card. It's kind of like a pantone swatch almost even, where you I'm just trying to keep it super minimal.
Right. I'm not trying to leverage the avatar IP, so I just want to be very minimal. All right.
Antonio says so Octobia's question doesn't get lost in the stream. Any advice about dimensions or proportions on a poster to look good? I believe this is a two x three. I'm just using 24 inches by 36.
You can do 18 x 24. Those are kind of like the standards. I think you can do a 36 x 48 as well.
So I would also just look at what frames you have. If you're making a poster for yourself, go see what frames you're going to try to fit it into. So you're not getting a custom framing because that's going to be a big pain.
It costs a lot of money, too, so just think about it like that. If you find a good frame, then fit your poster that you want to have printed done. Because to that, and that's going to save you a lot of money and time.
All right, so what we're going to do is try to test the system real quick. I'm going to pull in I guess Air, since that's the opposite. So I've got this really cool photo again, I pulled these from Unsplash.
Look at this airplane. So sweet. So I love this picture.
I think it's really cool. I think it has a lot of really cool colors in it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a mask again.
So just go up here, get the rectangle marquee tool. I'm going to boom, just select what exactly I had already for the last image, and I'm going to go back up to our Air photo and then create a layer mask. Yeah, I mean, as Anna says, I think it depends on the medium that the poster will primarily be used on.
That's true. Dimensions definitely help with that. But I think if you're just looking for a poster for your house, like, I made posters for friends before, and I just used the 18 x 24 and that was fine.
And then if you put it in, you can get it printed pretty cheaply. And then if you put it in a frame, it'll make it look a lot better. All right, so I'm going to unlink the mask so I can just move this image around.
So the one thing I don't like on this image is the airplane. So I'm going to actually see if we can do a content Aware Fill, which is so cool and it's so good for you. Whenever you're doing like, Photoshop edits, or if you're doing a mockup of something, you can use it to remove a logo or things like that from your studio or from your photo.
So what I'm going to do is just take the marquee. I'm going to highlight this airplane, and then in the airplane, I'm actually going to do edit. Oh, no.
It's Rasterized. Okay. I'm going to actually double click into it.
I'm going to mask it sorry. Do the exact same thing I just did. I'm going to do edit content Aware Fill or sorry.
I'm going to do fill and then do content where fill and then click Opacity 100% and boom, airplane is gone. So you look like a really incredible designer just by leveraging the simple tools that Photoshop already has built. That's pretty incredible.
The amount of AI that is leveraged throughout Photoshop to make you look better as a creative is incredible. Look at that. I mean, now we've got a great sky photo.
Thank you, Adobe. All right, so now we've got Wind. We're going to change out the background to batch something that feels probably a little bit more, maybe pink.
Kind of like keeping the pastels going on. Fill it up great when you want a piece of background. Yeah, it's awesome.
Texture is great. The people on the plane will never seen again. Oh, no.
All right, let's do wind. Is it wind or air? Right? Air benders. Air.
No, bads. Got it. All right, so we got Air.
I'm going to actually leverage a nice dark blue from this piece. Starting to look really nice. I'm going to leverage this little icons here.
Paste these in. Smart object. Again, I'm just going to scale it up.
I want it to be at the same scale. Yes, that's good enough. Again, you can kind of see how having different line weights on it isn't as beneficial.
So what I actually might do is I'm just matching the colors. I'm going to actually just take it and illustrate real quick. I'm going to add a stroke because these are already solids and it starts to get a little bit broken.
It's okay. I could make it myself. I know, but time is of the essence.
Speed through these posters. All right, color overlay. Boom.
All right, so we got that. Do two. Let me make sure that that's right aligned.
Actually it so we're going to actually grab this boom. Now I'm going to leverage these. All right, cool.
I think that's looking good. So we got little error. I know the copy didn't change.
I can change that. I think for the sake of this stream though, we're just going to chart along and act like that's different copy. Oh, look.
So such different copy. All right, we got air. I'm going to do Command J again, duplicate it.
Now we have a layer mask for that, which is nice. Let me see what I got for Fire. I'm just going to drag that in.
So we got this cool fire poster as well. I'm going to drag that in and then I'm going to drag the layer mask right above me over there. So now the layer mask is just applied automatically.
It's looking good for what this type of poster is and what is the style of this posters? It's essentially just a minimalistic take on a movie poster or a TV poster. This is just kind of anything we want it to be. Like, I could see this being used as somebody said trading cards earlier.
We're really just laying out type, laying out color. We're leveraging some really interesting photos. You can kind of see just it's whatever you want it to be, really.
I'm just here to help you guys learn the tools and make really cool stuff together this morning. So, yeah, it's for whatever we want, which is exciting. There's no right or wrong answers with it.
We're just making fun things and happy little accidents, as Bob Ross would say. Let's see, what color do we want to do for the backdrop? That's spicy, but I kind of like the spice. But to continue with the theme of these posters, I think it needs to be a little bit more toned down.
Ah, I don't want it to be super dark. Hmm, maybe the yellow is still too bright. Let me just keep pulling stuff.
These posters would be pretty cool in books. Oh, thank you. That'd be cool.
Instead of air bending. Alex airplane. Oh, gosh.
Oh, man. All right, let's like I love. Really? Oh, that's nice.
Actually, see, we're just leveraging what's in the photo and it's turning out pretty nice, so just click.
