let down & don’t panic

Posted Apr 4, 2011. Filed under design, articles. 9 comments.

Yay, so I finally got around to doing something again. And it was fun. And hopefully I won’t go so long without photoshopping again, because I think it does me good. Anyway, you’re probably here for eye candy or wit, neither of which I’ve produced so far. So, have your eye candy, and just ’cause I’m going to try to educated the ignorant masses and I’ll give you a bit of detail on both banners. Maybe you’ll learn something, if not about photomanipulation, then about how I work. *shrug*

So first off we have this snazzy Let Down banner. Let Down is a song by Radiohead, and you can listen to it here. The colors basically come from the emotion the song gives me. If you look at my other Radiohead banners you’ll probably notice they’re all dark teal. xD I guess they all make me feel the same. Anyway, there’s a bit of red at the top for interest, which comes from the original picture I used, of a train. (I used a picture of a train because the song starts with the lyrics, “Transport, motorways and tramlines, Starting and then stopping, Taking off and landing”.) The font also, was chosen to reflect the mood, and the text at the top left balances the bottom left text-chunk.

And now we’ve got a Coldplay of course, and just from looking at it you should be able to see that I was in the same mood and was getting the same emotion from both songs. This one is based off Don’t Panic, which has two different versions. One is old and spiffy with watery sounds (on the Blue Room album) and the other is less ambient (Parachutes). This image is made of a picture of water and hills, as well as a bokeh photo from Figmint’s stock photo section overlaid for enhanced contrast and texture. I chose the water picture because of the watery sounds of Blue Room’s Don’t Panic, and also because of the line, obvious here, “Bones sinking like stones.” The hills are from the lyric, “We live in a beautiful world.” The blurring of the text too, has a ghostly sort of feel which helps contrast the meaning of the words and bring out the darkness in the first set of lyrics shown.

So um, standing back now, I guess you can see how deliberate everything I chose to do is, even though it really doesn’t look that way if you were to watch me make these in photoshop. Its a lot of trial and error, but the main point is using every aspect of the design to point to the emotion of the song. That includes texture, color, word choice, font, font style, placement and all the other stuff I can’t think of. Next time you make a banner if that’s what you do, you should make sure all those things point to the overall meaning and fit together well. You can’t just throw any font on an image—there’s a lot more complexity to the process.

*clears throat*
So hope you’ve learned something.