Skill Share: Making A Banner

Hi all! I thought I'd show you how I made the new EtsyLabs banner. I'm not a trained graphic artist by any means but I love making banners, avatars, and general photoshopping! So here's the banner and the tips:

Here's the final product. ps click on any of these images to get some more detail!

Tip Alert! Download a fancy font! My favorite place to download free fonts is http://www.dafont.com/. Once you find something you like download it to your desktop and unzip it. Then go to the start menu -> Control Panel -> Fonts and then click "install font" and find that on your desktop. Do this before opening Photoshop.

Step One - Find some sort of background. I suggest a pic that may be floating around your flickr account, scan some fabric or ribbons, or fine something cool and free on the internet (but don't steal! Make sure its for general use.)

Step 2 - Crop this baby. Don't worry about the size yet. Just crop it so you get a good image (as wide as possible). Crop is a tool found on the left vertical toolbar - it looks like a box.

Step 3 - Now lets set the correct width. It should be 760 pixels. On the top horizontal toolbar click Image->Image Size and set the width to 760 pixels and select "OK".

Step 4 - Now lets work on the height. Do this by adjusting the canvas size (Image -> Canvas Size ). The height should be 100 pixels. In the canvas size window you can adjust the anchor if you want the pic to be cropped from the top, bottom, center etc.

Here's what we come up with so far:

Step 5 - Adding text. On the left toolbar you'll see the letter T. Click it! Now click on a space in the pic where you want to add your shop name. Now type in your shop name. Highlight what you just typed. Now you can change the font, color and size (see those options at the top of the horizontal toolbar in photoshop). Play around until you get a good result.

Step 6 - Rasterize text. At the top click Layer -> Rasterize. You've rasterized!

Step 7 - Add some dimension to your text. At the top again click Layer -> Layer style. Play around! For this banner I chose to use a suble "inner glow". Spooky!!

Step 8 - Glowing airplanes! I wanted those paper airplanes to stick out more. So I used the magic wand first. You can find the magic wand on the left hand toolbar. Once you have selected it just click on the items in the picture you want to "glow" (you can adjust the tolerance at the top if when you click on the items they aren't being selected properly). Hold the shift key while clicking away to select multiple items. Once you've selected all the items you want to pop, hover the mouse over any section of the picture and right click on the mouse. Now "Select Inverse". This should select everything EXCEPT the items you want to glow. Therefore any effect you now use will only change the background and not these items.

So now since I want everything BUT the airplanes to look a little less bright I go to Image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation. I decrease the saturation to make it a little duller. Feel free to play around in this section though! See what other effects you can create.

Step 9 - Save! Select File -> Save As. Save it as a JPG file. Save it somewhere you can find it in a minute.

Step 10 - Upload! Log into your etsy account. On the left side under Shop Setup you'll see "Appearance". Click it! Now in the banner upload box find your new banner! Once you have all you have to do is click "save changes" at the bottom and you are golden!

Tomorrow I'll be following up with a few more photoshop banner tips using actual Etsy members who have requested new banners. So stay tuned!

xo

Danielle