It's what separates the professional from the amateur.
Drop Shadows
If they are used incorrectly can look plain awful or they can look realistic. Being able to mess with a distance about a blur the opacity of dropped shadows can make them look more professional and sleek. They are a great way to add more dimensional layers to an otherwise flat design. Never use a drop shadow with a similar colored text or background. The less dropped shadows are noticeable the better. Make sure you increase the blur effect on text drop shatters so the drop shadow blends nicely into the background and doesn't pop out.
Manually created dropped shadows could have different bins and curves to them to create a shadow that looks more three dimensional.
Textures
The best use of the textures is fill the void of solid colored space. If you feel the space just needs a little something then scream back at texture by changing the blending mode or opacity. They can make the texture feel like it belongs there. Textures can be tricky like most of the small design details. Make sure your texture doesn't overpower a design piece being too strong or the wrong color can make a once clean design very busy. Make sure you reduce the opacity enough or play around with your different blending modes to find the right combination.
Another trick is to take a flat texture and add dimension to the edges by using the burned tool in Adobe Photoshop. You can make the edges darker to make the texture feel like it has highlights and shadows.
Patterns
Patterns can spice up that plane background as well. Creating your own patterns is fun in adobe illustrator. Geometric shapes work well with modern clean flat design. Try to use only one style of pattern per design. If you decide to use two different kinds of patterns make sure one is more prominent to avoid competing of the two different patterns.
Layers
One way to add layer to design is to add drop shadow to different overlapping elements. Tuck one side of an element up-to another. While leaving another element to top. This type of layering adds complexity to the design.
Color Profiles, size and bleed
There are two main files types, Digital and Print. Print documents can be anything physically printed out including flyers, posters, T-shirts, embroidery stickers and pens. Digital documents are anything that will exist on billboards ,Facebook ads and website graphics.
Each one of these two different file set ups will need their own color.
There are two color modes. Almost all print document need to be in CMYK color mode. CMYK stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black. These are the four basic ink color that printer needs to mix and create all the colors available for printing.
When you send your documents off to the online printer, it will take the document and make four metal plates. Each plate will print ink from only one of the main colors. All four plates will be spraying printed on your poster and all those color will mix to create a combination of millions of colors. This is why printed document should be in CMYK. But check specs to find out the color requirement before sending a file in.
RGB has to be used for anything purely screen. If you're doing a web ad for eg, the power requirements will always be in RGB mode. Computer screen have three lights nodes on each pixels of the screen. Each pixels will either have the red pixels, green pixels, blue pixels and finally just a plain white pixels. The combination of these pixels together creates millions of colors you see on screen. Anything that will end up being viewed on your screen will most likely needed to be in RGB mode.
Size
There are two main units of measure in design which are pixels and inches.
Bleed is only used for print document. Bleed is an extra amount of space that is required around the print document files. This extra amount usually the same around all the edges is needed when a final document.
Resolution
Resolution is the amount of pixels or dots per square inch. The more pixels per square inch the better the resolution. Digital images and documents can be 72 dpi. The computer and phone screen displays pixels at 72 dpi.
Retina displays screen are starting to become the standard resolution on mobile phones and high end laptops. That means dpi required for images to look crisman smooth might be higher than 72. So, we usually create digital documents with 300 dpi.
The higher the dpi the higher the file size. With digital documents sometimes there's file size restrictions so you really don't need to do anything higher than 300 dpi.
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
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