The Talented Mr. Taji

Morning Folks,

This post is all about me! me! me!

Actually no its just a fun post about another talent I have which is Graphic Design. As you might have read somewhere in my blog. I work in the advertising business… and I held the position of graphic designer (then art director… then senior art director.. all the way up to creative director) which means that I usually don’t need anyone’s help when I have design promo material for myself (like my website) or things like the Voiceover-casting.com button that I made for Brian Hudson a month or so ago you can see it on the side panel of my blog —>

If you would like to check out my design portfolio (its not really that new… I havent updated it since 2007) you can download it here

I rarely do freelance design work these days as it takes too long but I had offered Brian Hudson to do the talent profile badge for produlz.com which is the company that owns the website I host this blog with voiceover-casting.com.

For this endevour I will use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I wont get into he details of what the difference is between them but for those in the know how… one is for Raster Images (photoshop) and the other is for Vector images (illustrator).

Here is the image that Brian sent me…. he doesnt know what font they used to design it so I have two options… I either trace it or I try to use an online software to identify the font… Incidently I am writing this post as I am designing the button:

To try to identify the font I will use a site called whatthefont which I discovered through an application of the same name for the iphone. This should take a minute or two and will save me about 10 minutes of tracing…

No Such Luck!

So I ran the search and I couldnt find it.. next step take the image into photoshop and trace the logo as well as the font. I would have prefered to use the same font as the logo to write the words ” I’m a member of produlz.com” or “View my profile on produlz.com” but since I cant find the font I will have to use another one to contrast and write up that sentance.

Ok all done with the tracing.. took about 12 minutes (I took screenshots to show you the process)

This is during the tracing in photoshop:

and this is after the whole logo was traced… you can click on the images to make them a little bigger:

So now I take everything into illustrator (the paths of the tracing) and colour it and fix any path deformations… the whole reason I am doing this is to cleanly isolate the logo from the white background (although I can do that in photoshop… I prefer super clean isolation)

Here is what the logo looks like before colouring in adobe illustrator:

after that I sample the original image for the colours and introduce them to the line drawing that I made:

notice the swatch of colours on the side next to the logo that I used to identify the colours as well as the gradients used. The original logo that was done for produlz was possibly designed initially in illustrator or freehand and then adjusted in photoshop… I will not be using photoshop except for the last bit where I add it to the badge background.

Next step is to get the badge shape and write up the text that we spoke about earlier (Visit my profile at produlz.com).

Now I take the logo and lay it out with the button elements… and make a few options while I’m at it… and… Voila!

Now I’ll just isolate one of them to show Brian resize it for the webpages and save it as a button:

Now the button looks very small doesnt it… and I could have done it in 1/5th of the time if I just took the original file he gave me and edited out the white around it and just stuck it on my button… but:

a) where’s the fun in that!?

b)  I wouldnt have the logo in Vector Format which I can resize and make the size of a building without losing quality

c) I wouldnt have had much to say while writing this post… am I right or am I right!

thats it folks… I just wanted to show you the amount of work that goes into making things like desiging a tiny button like that… of course I was also doing additional work by tracing the logo in case more work was needed… like other designs or stationery ( basically a brand identity package).

I hope you enjoyed this non voice over related post (although the company I was making the button for is a VO agency!)

If you liked this post… please leave a comment… and if you would like to see even more samples of my Graphic Design and Creative work go to www.mahmoudtaji.com and check out the Creative Portfolio section.

Taji