Acceleris and Photoshop masking

Hello. I'm a little late blogging this week, but there is a reason for that. I wanted to include a piece of work I have just done with Acceleris Integrated Communications Agency in Harrogate, and we agreed that I could showcase it on my blog on Wednesday. Today! So here it is... a little concertina fold, designed and written for a housing conference in Brighton - it highlights the many skills Acceleris possess in social housing. The cover image was originally intended for page 3, but I felt it was so strong that it should be the lead image. However, I thought it would be fun to trace around the staff members and duplicate the image on page 3 as a keyline illustration - I think it works really well too.

This is the first piece of work I have done for Acceleris and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. Hopefully there are opportunities going forward to work with them again. And again...

I thought I'd finish this blog with a quick 'How To' lesson in Photoshop masking. There are several ways of masking an image in Photoshop, but this one is really useful and quick, and gives really nice results.

Step 1: Open the chosen image, add a new layer and fill it with 100% solid white.

Step 2: On the white layer, add a Layer Mask

Step 3: Choose a nice big, soft edged brush (its trial and error to get the correct size, but it shouldn’t be bigger than the element of the image you are masking off, but not too small either) and make sure 100% black is the foreground colour.

Step 4: Choose an opacity of 20-40%(ish). Again this is trial and error to an extent.

Step 5: Gradually ‘paint’ over the part of the image that you want to be seen through the mask. Make sure you still have the Layer Mask selected while doing this. Because the opacity isn’t 100% (or anywhere near), the more strokes you do over a particular area, the stronger the image becomes. This is what giver the finishes product a nice soft edge though.

Step 6: Experiment. Sometimes it’s nice to include some of the background ghosting through. The more you try it, the better the results get, although its very easy to get great results from the off.

Right, that's it from me for now. I hope you find the Photoshop tip useful. I'm off for a quick run before getting back to work.

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New clients, new relationships (professionally speaking)

Wow, what a busy week that was - and a very successful one too. I'm delighted to say that Howabout Creative Solutions had a couple of great meetings with Acceleris Integrated Communications Agency in Harrogate, the result of which is the prospect of Howabout working with them on their graphic design requirements from here on. Already I have designed a great little 8 page concertina-fold promotional brochure for them, which was very favourably received, and a larger magazine awaits my attention soon. Fab! Really excited by this development!!

Added to that, I did a day on location at Kariba Design Agency helping out with their heavy workload, and the signs are that this may be the start of a continued relationship. I hope so, as I really enjoyed the few hours I spent there, and it does make a refreshing change to get out and about occasionally and be in a studio with other like-minded creatives.

Added to that, two more projects were completed for York Test Laboratories, and a couple of ads for Clive Sutton luxury car dealership. All in all, another strong week for Howabout Creative Solutions in and around the Harrogate area (and beyond). Long may it continue!

Oh and I still had time to listen to some great tunes too: Jane's Addiction, Chemical Brothers, Skids, Beach Boys, Gorillaz, Orbital, Pop Will Eat Itself and Peter Doherty (as well as a few hours worth of the ever excellent 6Music).

Have a great weekend...

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A couple of work examples

Morning, and welcome to another grey day - ah well, it's nearly Spring...

I thought I'd do a quick blog today showcasing a couple of recent bits of graphic design work that Howabout Creative Solutions in Harrogate have done for YorkTest Laboratories in York (appropriately enough!).

On show here is a Barracuda banner which I did for their recent roadshow. Although I was supplied several potential images to use, and was given the freedom to choose any others that I thought may be appropriate, I decided that to focus on just one image, with some nice typography was possibly the way to go. To me, a good banner stand should be impactful but not overloaded with information and graphics - there is only a short window of opportunity to grab potential customers' attention and I'm confident this solution will do the trick.

In addition, on show is just the illustrative aspect of a mailer for YorkTest Laboratories I did earlier in the month. The client wanted a good graphic design solution to illustrate food intolerance testing, and more specifically, to highlight some of the symptoms associated with food intolerance. Initially, I thought it would be a struggle to encompass all the symptoms and it would water down the message somewhat, but once I hit on this design approach I knew we were onto a winner, and the client agreed. It was a fairly simple Photoshop execution, but it works well, particularly as the text can follow the contours and sinews of the torso.

For more design solutions like these, please take a look at the Howabout Creative Solutions link below.

Visit www.howabout.co.uk

Importing tables into Adobe InDesign

Afternoon from Howabout Creative Solutions - the friendly (and creative) graphic design agency in Harrogate. We've had a good week here - it's been half term, so had my lovely daughter at home, which means work sometimes spills over into the evening after she has gone to bed, but projects continue to be delivered on time, on budget, and above the expectations of the clients. Which is nice!

Continuing my recent theme (okay I've only done 1 so far) of sharing graphic design tips 'n' tricks, I thought I'd briefly talk about importing and styling up tables in Adobe InDesign. I've encountered numerous occasions when I've been faced with working with huge Microsoft Excel tables, sometime running to several pages. At first glance, they look daunting to deal with, but it's really quite simple...

Choose the 'Place' option in InDesign and activate the 'Show Import Options' button. When you have located the table in question you will find it imports with the cells and data in place (although some elements may be flowing off the page boundary). Highlight an entire cell and then choose 'Edit: Select all' to highlight all the text. You can then apply your chosen font, size, colour etc. You can also grab the edge of cells and expand or reduce them to fit your page width, or rotate text within cells to run it vertically.

Next, and this is a useful tip, highlight the top row that contains the header for each column, right click and choose 'Convert to Header Rows'. If your table spans several pages, the details of this row will then appear at the top of every page.

Another useful trick is to put an alternating background pattern on the rows, to make them easier to follow from left to right, and to make the table more aesthetically pleasing. Highlight all the cells, right click again, go to 'Table Options: Alternating Fills: Alternating Pattern' and choose 'Every Other Row' and try a 20% tint of a colour for the first row, and a 30% for the next row. Just play around until you find a colour and tint that your are happy with.

In fact, highlighting all the cells, and right clicking gives you all sort of options - setting the colour and thickness of the cell strokes; distributing columns and rows evenly; adding and deleting rows and columns - the list goes on. It really does make styling tables up really easy, and crucially it means you don't have to manually input supplied data yourself, and run the very real risk of entering it incorrectly.

I hope you found this little exercise useful. I find it works well if done in conjunction with something loud and guitar driven on the stereo - Led Zeppelin or Jane's Addiction for instance - but that might just be me...

Have a great weekend.

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Acrobat tips and tricks, Harrogate weather and ballet

Good morning, and welcome to a grey, cold and damp February Monday morning here in Harrogate. It's the perfect weather to stay in an work on some wonderful graphic design concepts - which is just as well, as I have a few to do, ranging from an exhibition banner, to flyers, direct mailers, pitch document covers and ads. Later in the week I also have a meeting with a Harrogate based company that, well, let's just say I'm really looking forward to. Really, really looking forward to. More about that later though.

It's half term week too, so got my lovely daughter at home all week, and my lovely wife for Monday and Tuesday too. Alice (that's my daughter) is appearing at the Harrogate Royal Hall later today in a Lynton Academy ballet production of Peter Rabbit and Friends. She will be taking the role of a frog, and is very, very excited, which is great to see, so although there is much to do today, really Monday belongs to her.

Anyway, I thought I'd expand the blog a bit to include a few design tips and tricks that may be of use. Today, a little Adobe Acrobat tip: If you receive an Acrobat file and find that it needs to be amended, but only have the reader version of Acrobat installed, it can also be done in Adobe Illustrator. It's amazing how much you can do actually, from changing text, to changing colours, to moving elements around - you can even open and edit multi-page pdfs (although only a page at a time). Okay, it can be a little labour intensive if there are lots of things to change (although really there shouldn't be, as a pdf file ought to be a final piece of artwork in its own right). There was one occasion though, when I was in possession of a 12 page presentation in Acrobat (but no source files) and had to input extensive amends to each and every page for a client to present later that day. What would have been an hour or so's work in InDesign took four hours plus in Illustrator, but it came together well and the client was none the wiser that I was, to use a technical term 'winging it'. Here endeth the lesson for today...

Right, enough talk about work, now a brief look at music... been revisiting a few old classics lately including The Wonderstuff's 'Hup', Mudhoney's 'SuperFuzzBigMuff' (great title, great album) and The Pogues' 'If I Should Fall From Grace With God'. If anyone has any recommendations for what I should be checking out (or if you simply what to slag off what I listen to), please feel free to leave a comment.

Have a great week - over and out.


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Busy times for Howabout (graphic design in Harrogate)

Good morning all.

Last week was a busy one for Howabout Creative Solutions as we continue with our quest to be one of the very best graphic design agencies in Harrogate. As well as accumulating a reasonable body of work to get through, a great meeting was had at Acceleris Communications Agency in central Harrogate (I know, saying 'central Harrogate' paints a picture of a sprawling metropolis, which Harrogate certainly isn't thankfully, but this place really is pretty central), and work continued on the presentation I am to deliver at the B4B meeting at Baildon on Thursday (to promote to fellow members what graphic design services Howabout Creative Solutions can offer to them and others).

I'll post back here on how the presentation went later in the week, but in the meantime its heads down and back to work (while enjoying the sounds of Leftfield).

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For more details on B4B check out www.lindabforb.co.uk

Website updates, work and testimonials (and Grunge)

Well the new Howabout Creative Solutions website seems to be generating favourable reviews. Its now a case of working on the SEO side of things and and making sure its presence is known to anyone looking for top quality design solutions from our Harrogate setup. We already look favourites to win some new business from a Yorkshire company (being deliberately vague here) and have had some more work from YorkTest Laboratories who have supplied a really nice testimonial for our website here... YorkTest testimonial

We have also lent our time and skills to Richard Taylor School in Bilton where I have been helping out with their school newsletter, which is written and designed by some of the pupils. Its great fun and very rewarding, and we are delighted to offer our support.

Finally, I have done a couple of days work with Words and Pictures in Otley, where they needed some design support at short notice. It was an enjoyable experience, and one which I'd love to repeat.

(Oh music recently has been supplied by largely Grunge and Grunge related offering, due to a fab CD on the front of Mojo magazine - Mudhoney, Vaselines, Melvins, Big Black etc etc. Great stuff that takes me back to my yoof, so it does!)

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