With the season less than a month away, I'm only just starting to look at designs for my 2014-15 ABL set. This is my very first take on the base card design. As always, it'll go through a lot of iterations, but in the absence of other cards to show you, I thought I'd put up my starting designs..
So, some thoughts on designs for this year's set are as follows.
- No designs requiring complex masking. As much as the 2012-13 set with the "lightning" backgrounds were novel , the masking of the players in my photos to get rid of the backgrounds was a tedious and time consuming process.
- Rounded edges. Noting that my recent sets have been printed with rounded edges, I thought I'd try and incorporate the rounded edges into the design for a better feel between the design and printed outcome.
- Border. Full bleed for the majority of the card design last year, I'm thinking of going back to bordered cards this year. My initial thoughts were a basic white border, but now thinking of different colored borders based around the uniform color for each player.
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| 2014-15 Base design concept card version 1 - © 2014 Adam East |
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| 2014-15 Base design concept card version 2 - © 2014 Adam East |
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| 2014-15 Base design concept card version 3 - © 2014 Adam East |
The above are my first attempts. The bottom of the card was taken from the
"Flashbacks" concept card designs I'd grabbed from an online tutorial. I'm working out how I want to modify this for several reasons.
- I don't like how the team logo goes onto the player photo - too messy in my opinion. eg The Cavalry logo gets lost in Hightower's glove in the above cards. Probably will put some type of shield behind the logo to create a distinction between the two.
- Player name. Working out how to incorporate the player name into the card. Thinking of shortening the team name to just the city, and replacing the full player position with the player name.I'll have to play around and see what looks better.
As always, any constructive feedback is welcome.
Very nice design, I really like the way it looks with the position in white and the team name in another color. I also like Version #3 the best, but I think I'd want to see other teams before saying that I like it better than the white border. Also, depending on how you implement this, you might want to consider how much extra work will be involved every time you create a card for a different team.
ReplyDeleteSome things to try...
Perhaps replace the team name with the player's name, and leave the logo as the sole identifier for the team. I'm not sure how well that will work, but it's worth a shot.
I wonder if putting a border around the logo would help it stand out from the rest of the card... either in black or in the border color. One trick I learned this year is to select something (in this case the logo), and then expand the selection around 5 pixels, and then fill the gap between the original item and the selection border with a color. I don't know how this gets done in Photoshop, but in the Paint Shop Pro software I use, I would use the Magic Wand tool to select the logo, and then go up to the "Selection" menu, then select "Modify" and "Expand Selection" (I usually use 5 pixels), and at that point use the fill tool to "pour" a color into the space.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of these!
Thanks for the ideas. I've already tried a number of variations including some that were similar to what you've suggested. I'll post up some more of the various concept ideas I've already tried later in the week.
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