Photoshop & Typography Research.

(Project 5)

Experimenting with Tools in Photoshop.

Due to me having limited experience on photoshop, I spent some time on the software identifying useful features and buttons I may find useful while creating my poster.

The Warp Text Tool.

This button allows you to select and adjust different options that will warp and bend the text that you have selected.

This makes it easier to mould the letters into different shapes therefore would definitely be useful if I was trying to achieve something similar to some of the photos above of the animals made up out of text.

Here to the right is an example of the options

that appear when the Warp Text Tool is pressed. These allow you to adjust how exaggerated the distortion and bending of the letters. At the top of this box that appears there is also a drop down menu of different 'styles' of warping.

Here are the options it has below:

Here are some examples I made of what this tool can do:

The Brush Tool.

The Brush Tool is used for drawing and sketching freehand with the mouse or a drawing tablet.

I think this tool would be useful when sketching or drawing out the outline of the animal I'm focusing on or sectioning off where certain words are going to be. An example of this is featured on the first website mentioned above or in the screenshot featured below.

Underneath is also an example of the menu and settings that can be brought up when selecting the brush tool. As can be seen below there are many different brushes to choose from and there are ways to edit already existing brushes to your standard to make things easier for you. The fact that the brush tool is so adaptable makes it useful and a good option to choose from.

You can change the colour of brushes among a lot of other things such as size, hardness, texture and more.

The Paint Bucket Tool.

To go along with the brush tool, the fill tool could also be very useful as instead of having to manually colour in everything drawn, you can use the Paint Bucket

[Fill Tool] in order to get a flatter and smoother layer of colour or just to save time.

The fill tool can also be used for filling in shapes made by the Shape Tool or paths created by the Pen Tool.

The Pen Tool.

The Pen Tool, much like the Brush Tool, is also extremely useful for drawing. There are various pen options that can be chosen when selecting which are in the screenshot below.

Some allow you to draw freehand whereas some use anchor points which make it much easier to draw outlines etc.

- The Pen Tool creates straight lines.

- The Freeform Pen Tool allows you to draw freehand.

- The Curvature Pen Tool creates anchor points that allow you to easily curve the lines.

- The Add Anchor Point Tool adds in an anchor point which can allow more flexibility

in your lines.

- The Delete Anchor Point Tool does the opposite of the previous option.

The Eyedropper Tool.

The Eyedropper Tool allows you to pick colours from other areas in your illustration/photo. It makes it easier to find and use the colours you have used before.

This will be useful to me when choosing a colour pallet and I am trying to figure out which colours contrast and harmonize the best.

Useful Websites and Research.

One useful source I found while researching and trying to learn more about typography and photoshop was the website: https://pcsharris.weebly.com/text-into-a-shape.html which shows examples of lettering moulded into the shape of animals.

There are also steps and useful links on the website that show how to do this in photoshop. In addition to this I really liked how the artist of these pieces uses bright colours and chooses colour pallets that harmonize, contrast and go together well. This is definitely an idea that I considered basing my design off.

The Website: https://www.educba.com/typography-in-photoshop/ was useful to me in many ways too and provided knowledge on lots of different photoshop typography techniques.

Examples & Inspiration.

The Lion King.

The Joker.

Crocodile Typography Art.

Lion Typography Art.

As can be seen by the examples above, the colours and text used are relevant to the thing that they represent. The colours also either contrast or harmonize really well. For example, the Joker Poster has used the colour red which is often associated with violence and negative, strong emotions which are all things that represent the character very well.

The text in the 'Joker' poster also almost looks like wild, frantic handwriting which is also something commonly seen accompanied with the Joker due to it representing his manner and personality very well.

This means that typically when designing something similar to what I will eventually be designing by the end of this project, I should probably use things such as bright colours and maybe bold, clear and easy to read letters.

I came to this conclusion because Yorkshire Wildlife Park is primarily aimed at a younger audience and these are the types of things that draw in children's attention while also looking artistic and effective to older audiences that may be looking to take their family on a day out. This means my poster design could either be mostly or entirely aimed at children or be aimed at a more universal kind of audience, therefore drawing in people of all ages.

More Examples & Inspiration.

Most of my original ideas for inspiration were mostly based on the thought that I was going to warp some letters in to the shape of an animal, however after I looked for more inspiration using sites like pinterest.co.uk and found many more great sources of inspiration.

Here they are featured underneath.

After finding these I came to a conclusion on what kind of style I wanted to create my final posters in.