Get paid for commercial fashion, magazine & product advertising design?!?  Yes you!  Learn the skills of Madison Avenue Advertising Designers here. (opens in new window)

Get paid for commercial fashion, magazine & product advertising design?!?  Yes you!  Learn the skills of Madison Avenue Advertising Designers here. (opens in new window)

use your rectangular marquee tool and choose a dark grey color from the swatch palette or color chooser. After you’ve chosen the color,

press Alt Backspace to fill this selection on the new layer with grey.

Since we’re already up here, let’s add some text. First choose a dark purple blue color to stand out well against the grey background and fit with our color theme. You’ll see how easy it is...just add some appropriate text, you know...something that you’d see on the back of a video release (study from your collection and let the design elements sink in). Change a few words but make it look like a real and official review. We want to look exacting and professional here. Change the reviewer in the same text editing field to a smaller font by selecting it (in the editing field) and lowering the font size.

Here I’ve used the Minion font. This works really well for cine-type.

If you’re not satisfied with a certain layer you have different options to edit it. Here I want a glossier and lighter grey than I had previously chosen. Select the filled layer in the layers palette and go to Image: Adjustments: Levels (Ctrl/Cmd L) and push the sliders to the left to lighten the layer up.

Use the same technique of creating the filled layer but this time make a really small and thin rectangular selection on a new layer of its own. Fill it with the same color of grey (use the eyedropper tool).

If the size isn’t right you can Ctrl T to make it just where you want it (a few pixels high max).

Go to View: Rulers (Ctrl/Cmd R). With these in view you can drag over guidelines and place them where you want. The purpose of this is to help align your layers to exacting specifications (or just where you think they should be. Often there will specs you have to meet from your client or publisher. Using “Snap” guidelines will snap to the closest layer and when you’re dragging layers they’ll snap into place near a guideline when ‘snap to guides’ is on.