Week 1 Creativity

 One of the biggest learning curves for me un this course is learning how to navigate the industry standard of photoshop. The many buttons, paths, settings, and shortcuts are overwhelming at a glance and are quite hard to keep tabs on especially with the constant updates.

It is important to know how to use an application like this, as it gives you more creative ability and tools to allow you to design whatever you need, for personal use, commercial, ect. 

The past few weeks have been insanely hectic for me, and to add to the craziness of work, the holidays are around the corner, when trying to decide what to give my neighbor, it dawned on me that my truck designs have been getting a lot of traction online- so I wanted to design a few shirts for his company. I also decided that when making this shirt, I wanted to dive more into the tools on photoshop to better learn and familiarize myself with its tools.

This is his logo, which sports the three Toyota racing stripes, a set of mountains, and little camping icons.

I wanted to be able to reference back to this logo, the colors and the tagline.

Here is the design I made; 

While there is still some fixes to be made, I will cover those later on, for now I will walk through my process of using tools.

Starting this, I had to find some source images, which was quite easy as the company primairly markets with off-roading images of their modded trucks, using the owners 4runner I imported it into photoshop and got to work. Originally there was a lot of difficulty trying to separate the truck and PARTS of the ground while keeping some of the rocky outline, then I remembered one of the lectures in class when we went over the different selection tools, so I used a combination of the quick select tool, magic wand, and manual lasso. From here I went through different filters, trying to get an illustrated look, which I found a few good ones in the filter library, which were easy to tweak and set to what I needed- afterwards I added texture to give more of a shirt feel, a tactic I've used before in other designs. After done with the filters, I used the magic wand tool to select a few of the areas to adjust the colors. making the whites and silvers pop more, and then adding more saturation for depth in the reds. After finished with the center of the design I made a few more fixes and then moved on to text- which of course started with an adobe font browse, as I needed a strong, clean font, that could be easily read from different distances. I went with Owners Narrow. From here I broke up each word adjusted some of the kerning manually, and the edited them to line up- afterwards I shift clicked the segments to group them and then repeated them downwards through the design.

For final touches I added a basic center stroke around the center piece to allow it to pop more from the words without taking away from the rest of the design, and then added in the tagline with a slightly lowered opacity.

My biggest issue with this design is the kerning in the word "overland" it looks different from the other letters and to me is really distracting, if I revisit this design I may also add in the mountains from the logo into the background, as a dark grey, so on the shirt its a subtle touch.