No ShrinkWrap Web2.0 Reviews

Recently I designed a custom brochure for a construction company. The client wanted mostly images with very little text and a professional layout. Clearly, a template-based tri-fold brochure cranked out in Microsoft Publisher was not going to get the job done.

As a side note: I plan on using this and similar techniques to create custom PowerPoint slide backgrounds and theme elements. A PowerPoint presentation’s design should use little text and combine with lecture material to provide visual cues that help students remember key points. The overall look of a PowerPoint presentation can affect a lecture’s success - the more professional and targeted a presentation’s theme and graphical elements are, the more likely students will be engaged and pay attention to the visual cues.

For the client’s brochure, I decided to start with a custom, watermarked background - by choosing the right construction-looking picture and creating a background from it, I could bring the images on each page together for a cohesive presentation. Once I designed a custom background for the images, the rest of the brochure practically created itself.

Before I begin: while I used Photoshop to create these brochure pages, I’m sure other programs like Gimp can be used to reach the same results. Since I work with faculty and students, I’m always on the lookout for open-source (or at least freeware) that can replicate what I do in pay programs; if I find a way to replicate these results in Gimp, I’ll write an addendum.

First, here are the images I used to create one of the brochure pages:

And the final result:

Since the client is a construction company specializing in building natural rock walls, I wanted a background that depicted boulders but lacked a lot of detail - too much detail would draw focus away from the project photos. I liked the look of the pile of boulders above - it’s very rough and chaotic and has a lot of character and edges, but I couldn’t use the photo itself. I started by cropping the image down to just the pile of boulders and copied the result into a new image in its own layer.

For the watermark, I envisioned somehow dropping the detail in the photo, making it black-and-white, then finding a suitable background color. I found the Graphic Pen filter accomplished much of what I wanted - I made sure my active foreground color was black, then applied the filter with the following result (before and after comparison):

Next, I used the eyedropper tool to select a neutral rock color from the original boulder photo - in this case, I selected #d0b08a. I used the Paint Bucket tool to fill the background with the selected color, then used the Layers palette to drop the opacity of the watermark layer to 30% so the background color shows through (you can also modify layer transparency by using the menus - Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options):

The resulting watermark is a great backdrop to the client’s construction photos - relevant to the brochure material and stark enough to show necessary detail while soft enough to not draw too much attention:

Have any favorite watermark and PowerPoint tips? I’d love to hear them - leave me a comment below.

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