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Name Plate - Color Scheme

A color scheme is a very important aesthetic component, but many people find it difficult to know where to begin settling upon a set of hues. I happen to be very lazy and I often find it difficult to be creative, so I like to find easy answers to coming up with ideas.

For color schemes, I like to look at preexisting things in order to draw inspiration from such as sunsets, insects, weird-ass sea creatures, and bricks.

After choosing an example to start with, I will use eyedropper tools to select color samples from the image. I will often choose at least three hues to begin with. If I choose two hues that are similar, I often like to select a contrasting third hue. Then, for each of the three hues, I will create dark, medium, and light value swatches.

If you were to draw inspiration for a color scheme, where would you draw from?

For this blog post, I am asking my students to create name plate for themselves using their colors from the color scheme they created. Students will also use two fonts: one for their name, one for a headline, where the headline would be something they might use for a LinkedIn headline.

I am attaching a screenshot of my InDesign document that I used to take an image of bricks to inspire the colors for a nameplate below. )My students, however, will attach their inspiration photo and each nameplate as a separate jpg.)

Embedding from Soundcloud

This is text where I will describe what you're listening to.

Swatchy

If this were a real post, this is where I would tell you how much I absolutely love swatches in Adobe InDesign.

Then, I wold post this image from my InDesign file, which shows the various hues and tints I created:

Lastly, you will post a screenshot of your InDesign layout, showing me your swatch panel. You are pasting this so that I can see that you altered the text color, and so that I know that you did in fact use swatches and that you didn't just use nine different colors!

Memes

One of the most treasured cultural artifacts Photoshop is helping us create is the "meme". A meme can actually be any cultural phenomenon that is reproduced on a massive scale, but in the age of Photoshop + social media, modern memes tend to revolve around funny images that are made even funnier by changing context, adding text, or both.

As an example, here is an image of the dictator Mugabe falling down:

Using Photoshop tools, you can cut Mugabe out of the image, add him over a new background, add some text, and voila: a meme is born (providing people share and/or remake their own versions).

Here are some examples I found on the web:

Make your own today!

Adjustment Layers

Adjustment layers are powerful tools in Adobe Photoshop. Many people love to use "brightness/contrast", but I wanted to show a few slighly more advanced adjustment layers that can sometimes do a much better job when enhancing photos.

Here is where I will mention that this is my original photo.

This is where I will talk about what I did with Curves, and what it did to the picture

This is where I will talk about what I did with Levels, and what it did to the picture.

This is where I will talk about what I did with Vibrance, and what it did to the picture.

I am just including the original image here, so that the reader can toggle back and forth between the original and the final.