Week 2: Designs and More Designs

 In the second week, I now had a good understanding of what I wanted most of the cards to look like so now the important part was keeping the layout consistent and repeatable with both the fronts and backs. I drew heavy inspiration from Allen and Ginter which happened to be my favorite card designs. 


I wanted the cards to be personal so I noted the watercolor background and then found unique watercolor designs to use in the backdrops of the cards. I also liked the borders and signatures on the cards so included those. For example, Nick Bollinger will be attending Montana State and loves the outdoors. For his card, I included a forest background. 
Another thing that Allen and Ginter are known for is their non-baseball sets of cards. These include anything from other celebrities to random objects. I wanted to include a non-baseball set of cards in my portfolio also. Here is an example of my friend Jack Spiegle who dressed up as Freddie Mercury from Queen along with the back design. 

The process of creating all the different designs took lots of time. The toughest parts include snipping each photo and making sure the edges are clean and visually appealing in photoshop. The next step includes matching the background tones to the image tones which can be difficult and that is why I had a few standard filters that I used from Adobe Lightroom to match the photos with the vintage look. The texts I used were downloaded from DaFont and are unique to my designs. With not a lot of familiarity in photoshop, Mrs. Zulandt helped me out very much with some quick teaching skills and tune-ups on how to go about and do certain things. Most of the time, there is a quick easy way to do something in photoshop, but unfortunately, it usually takes a while playing around and experimenting to find the shortcut. This was definitely true for me. 

Finally, after all of the editing, cutting pasting, drawing, and erasing, I had to get the photos ready for print. This was a challenge as I did not take this into account in my first designs. I had to make sure that the canvas in photoshop was extra big to allow for the machine to make the sharp cuts on the cards. I then realized that my borders were too big on all of the cards so I had to scale everything down on all of the cards. Lastly, I had to set the files in CMYK and 300 DPI and save them as pdf to print. I compiled one PDF containing all 20 different card designs fronts and backs along with a team card design file that I plan to have many copies of. 

I am very excited to see how these designs turn out in person next week!


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