I trust ya. I don't have Photoshop out at the studio (go figure).
Originally Posted by Razor Ramon
I really like the choice of color. Something nice about pastel blues against brown is nice. Just like lime green + pink. Colors that you wouldn't think would work but look great together.
Anywho!
I'm in agreement with Yeller on the design. It's clever and simple making it easy and fun to read. The guitar going off the layout is great, but I'm a bit iffy about the same thing with the type. Being so close to the border like that means it could get clipped into. Now I know missing a small piece of any of the type won't make it illegible, but its more aesthetic.
But its not in danger of being clipped off.
Ambassador of Kickyourassitor
I'm going to get gay here for just a second...
That color scheme is like my total color scheme that I buy clothes by and wear and love. It's looks great!!!!
Okay, done.
i drink it up!
Never colour match to your screen. They're always different, and I doubt the dude who's printing them will know what to aim for unless you give him a colour printout.
Anyway I think the design is pretty good. It's a little bit busy for my taste, and I'd definitely like to see the information and company name given more white space around them to breath. (I don't mean increase the leading on the info -- that's fine as a group) It just seems like there's a little too much going on around the name of your company. Making it smaller and leaving some brown empty space around it would probably help it a little bit. Because the logo is blue & big and the guitar is blue & big I think they're competing a little bit for your eye. Allowing the logo to step away from the guitar and not butt up against it would probably help the hierarchy in the layout a lot. The colour scheme of light blue and brown is rad (I did an eye drop test on the blues in the layout, and all of the values were consistent, which is good. They should come off the press exactly the same as each other). I find the brown has a shit ton of red in it though. Something a little more neutral brown might be better with the blue, but that's preference call not a hard critique.
The guitar / strings are pretty easily recognizable icons so from a marketing perspective it's good, but I don't like the font on the logo (something cleaner and less chunky, something with cleaner letterforms). I'm noticing some jaggies on the guitar frets and the diode looking things, too. The edges are a bit fuzzy and unclear, so you might want to try to make those in illustrator and import them in as smart objects to get that shit extra crisp. You literally just draw the shapes in Illustrator, and then with your Photoshop PSD opened under your illustrator window drag and plop it in to your layout.
The way your file is set up now your logo and the fret of the guitar won't be anywhere near the border of the card because of the safe area. I think people are just confused because the preview you posted only includes the safe area, not the entire trim size of the final card. It will be trimmed on the outside guides, not the inside ones, so it will be fine. I've attached the file with how it should look when final so people can see (3.5 x 2, standard wallet card size):
So you'll definitely have some space around your shit in the end, which is always better. It would be a waste of money to have your business name lobbed off at the top or side. Generally, as Yellerdog touched on, you either want something to be in the safe area or bled entirely out (like your guitar). Any pertinent info shouldn't be in that zone at all.
Last edited by Drewbacca; 17 Aug 2008 at 03:12 PM.
They're PMS colours and my monitor is PMS colour accurate because I rule like that/had a lot of free time/stole a PMS colour wheel from my old job. So it should come out exactly like it looks on my monitor... I can't speak for the rest of these suckers.
Thanks for your input sunshine... I'm thinking that even a little jagged, the guitar should print ok, but the diode looking thing needs to be sharper, thanks for making me notice that. I can't explain how long I started at it before and didn't even notice that. FUCK.
I'll clean up the shapes tonight and try letting the company name breathe a little bit more and up something else tomorrow.
i drink it up!
NP on the feedback. I didn't notice the thread earlier.
I think the guitar will be okay because it has a noise in it that helps mask any issues. But yeah, you'll probably notice the diodes and fret. It's probably like 2 or 3 minutes of work in illustrator to fix it dude. Also I'm noticing the little shapes at the ends of the diodes have a line thickness thinner than the other parts (the solid blue line). Is that how you wanted it to be? It looks inconsistent.
Its a resize of an actual schematic, I didn't really clean it up much.
I also don't even have Illustrator anymore, so I imagine I'll be doing this with the line tool in Photoshop.
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