Assignment 7: Terrific Text Explorations

The Instructions:

There's nothing that substitutes for great text, and Photoshop is the champ in this corner!

Create a text string (you know: your name, your company's name, your school/state/town's name, your favorite foods! doesn't matter; have fun!) of any size/style/font that you have available. Keep it as a selection and copy to the clipboard right away! If your explorations go awry, you can recover by pasting, or just re-use the text tool. It remembers the last text input right in the dialog box.

Apply filters to the text selection. Begin with the texture explorer and gradient designer, add a touch of ripple, motion blur and lighting effects; crown with channel operations and Convolver.

Get the feeling of a few strings in iteration experiments: Do three or four variations, and paste them all on one document next to each other, saving selections as you go along. Compare techniques. Which work and why? Save that document! Call it: Iterations>Your Name.

Now, take the coolest examples and paste them onto new documents with outrageous backgrounds of textures and composited photo images, colorized and enhanced for saturation. Stretch, resize, duplicate the text. Add other strings. Save the selections as you go. When you've got an image that really sings, save it. Call it: Text Art>Your Name.

You get the idea! Make text your art for this assignment.

There is some incredible power for designing text in Photoshop. And using it is easy and fun! You get lost in time and space, too. Watch out, this is a real right-brained activity. Time flies!

Upload the two images in the JPEG format (medium compression) so that they are compatible with the browsers for the world wide web. But always save a high resolution version of the image for maximum viewing pleasure. JPEGs help get us around on the web fast, but they are a very lossy compression.

Remember to CORM! Compress once - read many. Never save your images as a JPEG or GIF or PICT-JPEG until after it is completely finished. Use the Photoshop file format. That's what the program likes best! Just knock-off compressed images from the original as you need them!

Saint's Favorite Simple Drop Shadow Technique:

1. create the text
2. copy the selected text to the clipboard
3. in the levels palette, drag the opacity slider down to 1
4. from the Select menu, choose Feather
5. enter a value of 8 or 9
6. from the edit menu, select fill, then fill with 100% black
7. then paste the original text back on top of the shadow
8. offset to suit by moving

Best and fastest way to create a drop shadow, ever!

--KPT Saint

Examples:

Sound Sales -- Harry St.Ours Adobe Photoshop (63KB jpeg) These are sample logo designs for a major musical equipment distributor. (I trade design for guitars - my weakness). All done in Photoshop, with various filters, selection techniques, and channel operations.

Web Buttons -- Harry St.Ours Adobe Photoshop (59KB jpeg) These are buttons on my web site home page. All done in Photoshop, with various filters, selection techniques, and channel operations.

St-ours.com -- Harry St.Ours Adobe Photoshop (52KB jpeg) These are sample text designs for my domain name. All done in Photoshop, with various filters, selection techniques, and channel operations.

TED6 -- Kai Krause (46KB jpeg) This is a masterful image by Kai Krause, created for the TED6 conference last year.

The Results:

	Iterations -- VJacobsen Color Mac (42KB jpeg) Last assignment.
	Text Art -- VJacobsen Color Mac (48KB jpeg) Last assignment.

	Iterations -- Don Morehouse PowerMac 7500, Scanner, Adobe Photoshop (79KB jpeg) These are some variations on the word "feline." Mostly used native filters on Adobe Photoshop.
	Text Art -- Don Morehouse PowerMac 7500, Scanner, camera (259KB jpeg) This is a photo composite of my friend, Mel, my cat, and some text all manipulated in Photoshop. Look closely and you will find my cat, Patches, texturizing the background.

	Iterations -- JaneM17941 Color Mac (98KB jpeg) Different experiments with text including the process from Kai's discussion last week.
	Text Art -- JaneM17941 Color Mac (63KB jpeg) Many steps using PS filters and KPT resulted in the text.

Iterations -- Stephen667 Color Mac (34KB jpeg) Oooooo! Download high-resolution version (150KB jpeg)

Text Art -- Stephen667 Color Mac (64KB jpeg) But...

Iterations -- AFH Alex Win95, Photoshop 3.0.4, KPT 2.0 (58KB jpeg) Text iteration experiments for a logo design for the NFLFantasy web site.

Text Art -- AFH Alex Win95, Photoshop 3.0.4 (33KB jpeg) A preliminary logo design for a Web Design service.

Relax -- AFH Alex Win95, Photoshop 3.0.4 (55KB jpeg) Not exactly text art, but I thought it was time to relax at the end of the course! :)

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