Learn how to adjust and place a logo on a postcard using Adobe Photoshop, ensuring clear visibility without compromising the overall design. This article offers a step-by-step guide on how to position the logo, add a company title, adjust fonts and color, and align the logo with the background image.
Key Insights
- When positioning a logo in Photoshop, it's crucial to set guides to help determine the exact location. In this case, the logo is placed at the bottom right corner of the postcard, with a specific guide set an inch from the bottom and another guide an eighth of an inch from the border to avoid the logo touching the edges.
- Font size and color are essential aspects to consider when adding a company title under the logo. In this scenario, the font size is adjusted to fit the guide set for the title, and the color is switched to white to make the company title, Strategy Skyline, stand out more against the background.
- Aligning the logo with elements in the background image can enhance the overall design. Here, adjustments are made to the Austin background image to have the yellow bike lane run into the top of the logo, giving the postcard a more cohesive look. The Clone Stamp tool is used to remove parts of the bike lane within the logo area for a cleaner appearance.
In this video, we'll be continuing to adjust our postcard, and we'll be working with the logo on the bottom right hand of the screen. To begin, let's first do a little cleanup work in our layers panel.
Let's select the title bar, the textures, and the text above, holding shift and clicking building the future skyline, so we have all five highlighted, and next, let's move them all and group them into one folder that we'll title title bar. As we can see, we now have a little more room in our layers panel to work. Let's create one more group now, and we'll title this logo.
And we'll drag the high-resolution logo into this folder. We'll be adding one more layer here, so it's important to have it grouped off. Looking at our image, what we're going to want to create is a logo in the bottom right hand corner of the screen with the company title Strategy Skyline below it in text.
So first, let's set a guide for where we want our logo to be. The company has requested that the logo be in the bottom inch of our postcard. Therefore, at 4.25 inches tall, we're going to want to create a guide at 3.25 inches, and we'll release it there.
Therefore, our logo will need to be contained within this bottom inch. In addition, I always like to set a guide an eighth of an inch up, just to give ourselves extra space to work with. And let's set another one an eighth of an inch to the right from the border, so that our logo is not touching the edges.
From here, let's set one more guide exactly one inch from the right-hand side at 5 inches, and here we'll have the space that we want our logo to be. Let's now begin adjusting our logo. We'll highlight it in our layers panel, and we'll simply drag it up.
And next, we want to be just a little bit bigger. We'll click on it, hit CTRL T to transform it, and we can drag it out. However, we probably don't need it to take up this entire space.
Let's zoom in. I'll simply drag in from the sides and hold ALT so it's centered, and we'll leave it about that size. While it's not important the exact size of it, we do want it to be contained within this one inch and not touch in the edges.
We'll hit ENTER and work with this size for now. Next, let's add the company name below, Strategy Skyline. Within Logo, we'll add a new layer, and we'll title this Strategy Skyline title.
We'll then go to our horizontal type tool, and let's create a bounding box within these guides. We'll drag it, and let's drag it up a little bit. And as we can see, our font is currently too big.
We'll adjust this to 12 points in our options bar, and hit ENTER. And let's type in Strategy Skyline. As we can see, the font is still a little too big, so we'll click, hit CTRL A on the keyboard to select it all.
And let's bring it down to 8-point font, and let's see what we're working with. It's starting to be a bit better of a size. However, it still might need to be a little smaller.
We'll select all, and drop it down to 6. This seems to fit within our guide well. We could probably even move it up to 6.5 to get the most out of our size. And this is a pretty good look.
Let's zoom in, and the next thing we want to do is change our Strategy Skyline text to be white, so it pops out a little bit more. We'll click on it, hit CTRL A on the keyboard, and we'll change the color in our Properties panel. We'll then change it to white, click OK, and there we go, Strategy Skyline pops.
Next, let's zoom out and see how this looks. Currently, the logo looks a little bit big for my taste, so we'll click High Resolution Logo, CTRL T, and let's just shrink it down a little bit. In addition, we'll center it with Strategy Skyline.
As we can see here, as we drag it over, we'll see pink lines indicating that it's lined up evenly with Strategy Skyline, and we'll release it, and check our work. This looks pretty good. As evidenced by many of the videos in this course, creating marketing materials often requires a lot of minor changes and going back and making adjustments.
Therefore, continuing to adjust the size of our logo and our text is a common practice of Photoshop. Don't be discouraged if you don't get it right on the first try. Photoshop's all about adjusting and making tweaks.
For our next task, I'd like to again revisit our Austin background, and because we have a yellow bike lane coming down the edge here, I'd like for that bike lane to run right into the logo. We could do this by adjusting our logo and dragging both of these over. We'll hit CTRL T, and we'll simply edge them over with the keypad.
However, if we zoom in, we'll see that we're starting to run out of room here if we want it contained within these guides. Therefore, let's leave it right there to the left, and we'll simply move it down with the arrow keys. We're going to leave it there, as that's the most space we can work with.
Next, we'll need to adjust our Austin background. Let's zoom out again, and with Austin background highlighted, let's hit CTRL T to transform it, and let's drag it up, making sure that we still have some space between the top of the building and our title bar. However, we can drag it up slightly so that the bike lane runs into the top of our logo, and so that the circle here is still relatively centered within our postcard.
I'll hit ENTER to solidify this change, and here we go. This is still relatively even within our postcard, and the bike lane runs right into the top of Strategy Skyline. Let's hit CTRL S to save our work, and let's make one final change to this image.
I want the bike lane to run straight into the logo here. However, then once it enters the logo, I want to remove it. We can do this with the Clone Stamp tool.
We'll go over to our Tools bar, and we'll select the Clone Stamp tool, holding Pattern Stamp tool, and selecting Clone Stamp tool. So with Austin background selected, and with ALT held, we'll select the area on our image. However, we see that we still can't drag over the spike lane because we have the void sign for our cursor, so we'll click and see what the issue is.
In this case, the smart object must be rasterized before proceeding. So by clicking OK, we can now edit this change. Let's zoom in, and all we want to do is remove this part of our bike lane.
We'll hit ALT to select the pixels we'll draw from, and we'll simply start drawing over the bike lane. We'll hit ALT again, and we'll start making these changes. As remembered with the Clone Stamp, it's a lot of hitting ALT and clicking, but it gives us a better look for our image and helps it to be consistent.
Let's scroll over to the right a little bit, and we can see that here the bike lane runs straight into our logo, and we have our text below. Finally, let's remove our guides so that we can get a better look at it. We'll go to View, Clear Guides, and this looks pretty good.
Nicely done. Let's save our work, hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll be exporting our postcard. See you there.