Lesson Info
5. Prepare Files for Social Media & Email Signature
Lessons
Lesson Info
Prepare Files for Social Media & Email Signature
How do we do all this stuff, now that we made all these fun examples? How would we get them out of Photoshop and do anything else with them? Well, it depends on what we're doing of course. So, if we're going to print this, if I was going to put this, where would we put this glittery thing? I don't know. Where do people put, that could go on a bag, it could go on a phone case, it could be just printed, it could be framed at a wedding guest book table or something. I don't know, there's a million things you can do with it. So, if we wanted to print it, we would want to make sure that when we built it at the size we're going to print it with because although, we do have the vector text, this glitter treatment is not vector. That's just a photo-based raster pattern. So, if we needed to enlarge this somehow, I would probably throw away all the glittery paint effects and go back. That's why I duplicated this. Because now if we go look at these type, if I turn off the effect, the layer is gon...
e. There, it's invisible. I mean, I think I could bring it back maybe, let's see. It just got like wiped out and replaced with the pattern. So, that's why I duplicated it. So, I would throw away all that stuff and I would just go back to my... Oh, I would make this black but my vector type and then I would scale it to whatever size I needed and then go re-apply the glitter. So, it's helpful when you're making something like this, that would really be like some sort of art piece on top of the functional use of a monogram. It's helpful to build it with your end use in mind. So, if you're going to build like some amazing art piece, maybe you want to gift it to clients, like wedding clients and give them a canvas of their monogram. I don't know. I'd want to build it at that size, just to save yourself the hassle. But anyway, so let's assume that this is the size we want and we're going to print this and everything. Then of course, we save the PSD file for ourselves and then if we were going to send this to a lab or a printer, depends how we're using it, we might want to hide the background and then we would just save this as... probably... they probably want... well you'd have to ask them. It might be EPS. But probably not with all the glitter. If it was just the text, it would be EPS. With the glitter and everything, and a clear background, probably you would go with like a PNG file. Nobody wants your Photoshop files. Those are usually just for you. Vendors are never going to ask for it. Clients will want Photoshop files possibly, but vendors don't want your Photoshop files. So, the vendors can tell you what kind of file you would need to do. If we're going to make this for a web little signature or something, there's the coolest tool that I discovered recently. Because I was making my own actually, before I made this class, I was like, "I need to have a better email signature." And then I was like, "Perfect, we can include this in class." We would want to size it to whatever size you want. And for me, I found that 200 pixels worked well, but I guess it just depends what you are looking for in your signature or if you need it bigger or smaller. So, I'm just cropping this to clear up all that space that we had. And then I would resize this by coming up to Image, Image Size. And because I want to downsize this image, I would make sure I have Resample on. So there's a lot of confusion if you're newer to Photoshop and you're like, "I don't understand image size." I actually did a whole 90-minute course on image size and resizing images because it is confusing, but it doesn't have to be. So, what I tell people is whenever you're trying to downsize stuff that's when you would turn on Resample. Because that's going to allow you to either throw away pixels, which is okay if you're intentionally doing it, or if you're not paying attention, you might accidentally invent new pixels from the Pixel Fairy, which is not recommended. So, I say turn it on only when you're downsizing. So, let's say we want to do that, we'll turn on Resample and we'll put in for a width of 200 pixels for our little e-mail signature and I would click OK. And we see that it indeed got smaller on our screen, which means now we'd have to zoom in and now it's going to look crappy because I'm zoomed in to 300% or whatever. And actually you know what, it did sort of do a weird thing with the pattern, didn't it? So, did you see that? It looked crappy. So, what I'm going to do is I undid that and we're going to come in here and I think what's happening is these effects overlays are getting all whacked out when we resize it. It's messing up these effects. So, what we're going to do is rasterize all of that. So, I'm going to right click here on the group four copy for the folder. I'm going to right click and say merge group. And now the whole thing is just pixels. And we don't have to worry about that funny business. So, now we'll go back to resize this to 200 pixels for width. Now, it looks good. I mean not zoomed in the 400%, but if we view it at 100%, it looks good. So then, we would save this as a PNG or if you don't have a need for transparency, this could be a JPEG. So, I would save this as a PNG. Let's say, monogramos. We'll make it a PNG and wherever we save that. And then, there's this cool tool and I link to it in the resource guide. I can't show you on camera, but I can tell you that it's at HubSpot. If you just Google like "HubSpot email signature generator" or something, and they have this little widget thing and you just upload a graphic and then you can go in and say like, I want this graphic and I want... my Twitter is this, my Instagram is that, whatever. And they give you the html code and you just copy and paste it into your email client, whether that's Gmail or Apple Mail or whatever you're using. And then, it's just like magic and all your stuff appears, and all the links work and you upload your little graphic. So, when I made mine, I made mine with 200 pixels. But you might decide you want something bigger or smaller. So just choose accordingly, and there you go. And there's a link to that in the resource guide.
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Ratings and Reviews
Samantha
I love this teacher! She is funny, her classes are easy to follow and this one is no exception. In this class, the teacher present 4 different monograms and we are then invited to create our own using these techniques. The steps are easy to follow and give awesome results!
Mimi Cu
The teacher was very clear and funny. She made the class very enjoyable.
a Creativelive Student
Who knew monograms were so easy! Thanks Khara. I have given a personalized monogram design to my wedding clients and they all love it.