fred design

Textured type stamp letterpess photoshop tutorial

Hello all. I always love authentic letterpress type type. You can always tell when this has been achieved and quite often it displays a lovely texturised quality. So today, im gonna try and show how an effect like this can be achieved using photoshop. This tutorial is being done in Adobe Creative Suite CS as this is all I have at home, but all the tools are pretty much in the same place in CS3 and 4 I think.

Step 1.
firstly create the type you would like to texturise. I have created this in illustrator and then copied it across to photoshop. You will need to use a font with a lot of weight to it. It is also good to use quite a classic font. A heavy serif font is quite nice. I have used helvetica neue condensed black. Anyway – plonk it into photoshop and we’re ready to go! Make the document greyscale colour mode as well by going Image>Mode>Greyscale. This just suits the purpose for what we are doing and you can always add colour later if desired.

Step 2.
OK so we have our plain black text in photoshop. Now we want to start roughing it up a bit. We are going to use a set readymade photoshop tutorial to begin with to add some roughness to the edges. Go to Filter > Artistic > Paint Daubs. Set the brus size at 3, the sharpness at 3, and the brush type at simple. As you can see this has just taken some of the perfection from around the edges.

Step 3.
We are now going to add some texture to the whole of the type, not just the edges. Firstly, create a new layer. Now go to filter > render > clouds. A grey kind of cloud effect should fill the screen as your top layer. This just offers us some different tones to start playing with.

Its still quite light though, so lets darken it up a bit. Go to image > adjust > brightness contrast. I have taken the brightness down to about 70 as I want wuite a strong black. Now lets add some grainy texture. Go to filter > noise > add noise. I have et my amount to 40 and kept the distribution set to 40. Press ok, and you will be able to see the cloudy effect now has a grainy dark quality to it. But…its still just filling the whole screen. On the layer palette, select the layer as screen and you will now see the effect is only visible over they type. Already we have a really nice textury stampy letter effect.

Step 4.
With me so far? good. Don’t worry there is nt too much more now. Lets flatten our image before we go any further. On the layer pallette, click on the options arrow in the top right hand corner and select flatten image. Now we simply have to add some finishing touches. At this stage I always like to darken the image again and add some more contrast to suit my taste. To do this simply select, image > adjust > brightness contrast again but you might not need to. Finally, it is time t just go over the edges a bit more. This I do by hand, using a textured brush on the eraser tool. Set it to about 90% opacity and carefully do over some of the edges to add a bit more texture. This is most effective on the corners. Be careful not to overdo it though as subtelty is the key here.

And thats all there is to it! You have a nice textury effect. You can now add colour to it, place it over images, invert it etc. It can sometimes be that little bit of detail you need. Below you can see the finished version and also a version where I have inverted it to white and overlayed it on an image. I hope you found this tutorial useful. Any questions or feedback, I would love to hear!
all the best and please leave a comment.

Making something out of nothing

I have recently been working on a project for a recycling company I would love to share with everyone. Its still at the developmental stage at the moment and myself and the very talented London based designer David Moloney have been working with YCN and the Johanna Lundberg on shooting some test shots seen below.

The shots which are for a corporate brochure are based on the idea of recycling in general. Making something out of nothing. There were lots of ideas floating round at the start…we liked the idea of the brochure being transformed into something else after it had been used. We rejected this on the grounds that we would rather people kept the brochure than ‘recycled’ it and also through print concern for a very small budget. We also considered every bit of text throughout the brochure being shown on packaging of various materials that the company may be recycled. However we felt that this would compromise the brand a little too much and also might effect legibility. In the end the client went for a concept that concentrated on almost utopian style shapes or illustrations being made using entirely recycled materials which may be recycled, or ‘rubbish’.

So for the past couple of weeks we have been sending out rather pushy emails insisting to everyone that we really did want to take their colourful rubbish off their hands and are very proud of our growing pile. We think the original test shots are looking really good. They are not too ‘pretty’ which is important when displaying recycled rubbish I think but have such depth that are really interesting. We liked the idea of keeping them all really simple shapes and not too detailed as this almost makes the reader of the brochure have to engage with both the pictures and the copy more. Anyway, we are expecting to shoot the final shots soon so I will hopefully show more in a couple of weeks. Feedback at this stage would be great!

Some words are worth a thousand pictures

Hi all, I wanted to show some illustraions I worked on recently. It was for a project entitledsome words are worth a thousand picture’. The brochure was stressing the importance of getting the copy right as well as the visuals, and obviously reversing the popular phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. So the concept was to make pictures out of words, simple oas that!

I did it, by overlaying the words on the pictures. The words are all taken directly from the copy and are ‘buzz’ words so hopefully help to bring out key points. High contrast images were the ones that worked the best.

Actually, the brochure probably wont be used. Which is a feeling probably most graphic designers know when something they have made does not get selected. But anyway, would be great to hear your thoughts.

All the best.