Here’s a little preview of a display font I’m creating. It’s a mix of hand drawn acrylic brush strokes and geometric structures. Let me know what you think!

A great workflow trick that I went too long without using is creating smart layer comps and using built in Photoshop scripts to output them to a neat series of jpegs for comps, boards and presentations. I’ll show you how.

Open up Photoshop and create your design. For this example, here is mine:

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Now, you want to go through and simplify your folder structure and name everything concisely. Finally, take everything that is visible, including the background, and group it into one folder like so:

Now, let’s say we want to riff on this design and do another iteration with a different color. Rather than opening a new document or duplicating only the layers we want to change and trying to remember which layers should be visible for which comp, let’s keep it simple. Duplicate the whole group.

You can then make your changes in the new duplicated folder. And, if you want to compare one state to another, it’s as simple as clicking the visibility icon one time. This makes comparing versions of a design much, much easier.

The best way to generate comps is to use the “Layer Comps” panel. Make sure you have the version you want to be the first jpeg visible in the layers panels and click “Create new layer comp.” Name it whatever your group folder is named and repeat the process.

Now that you have layer comps for each state  you can click through them by clicking the icon to the left of the layer comp you want to preview.

Now, the genius part that they don’t teach you in design school. We’re going to use a script to output all of our layer comps as separate jpeg files without having to do one at a time.

When you’re done you should have an organized folder with neat file names that are all ready for clients, art directors or your portfolio.

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Executing well in Photoshop is key to being a successful art director or designer. And I’ve found that it’s the little touches that separate masters from novices. Here’s a little touch I learned today.

Say you’ve got an image that’s faded or has very low contrast and you want to fix that. The typical way of doing that would be to use image>adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. Or to open Levels and “pinch” the dark and light sliders in to the histogram. These ways work but tend to manipulate your colors in undesirable ways and render your image un-editable afterward.

If you want to add contrast like a pro do this: create an adjustments layer on top of your image and pinch the dark sliders for dark and light pixels in the histogram to the center until they’re aligned to the dark and light pixels that actually exist in the image. this will allow you to make as many changes as you want later and preview them in real time.

Now, the most important part: set that layer’s blending mode to “Overlay.”

Using the “overlay” blending mode is very important as it takes the adjustments you’ve created and applies them to specific areas of the histogram. The adjustments to the darks are now being applied to the darks and so on. And here is our result:

And a comparison:

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