Design an Elegant and Patterned Invitation Flyer in Photoshop

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Many people still find the classic, elegant and patterned design aesthetic of the classical eras beautiful and eye-catching today. In this tutorial, you will learn how to design an elegant patterned invitation flyer. We will be usingAdobe Photoshop here as it has the most easy to understand features that will let you achieve that classy look. So let us get started.

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1.  First setup our flyer document. Create a new document by pressing CTRL+N with Adobe Photoshop open. The document settings window should appear. There are lots of different flyer printing sizes, and you yourself can actually easily setup a custom sized flyer if needed. You can of course start with the following settings for a standard sized flyer.

2.  The next step  is to add our bleeds and margins. First we add the margins. Go to View -> New guide… This opens up a window where you can set the orientation and distance of a margin guideline from the edge of a document. For this first guideline, use a vertical guideline and a 0.25 inch distance. The full list of margin guidelines is below, just repeat the process until you have the margins setup.

1. Left Margin: Vertical – 0.25 inches
2. Right Margin: Vertical – 8.25 inches
3. Top Margin: Horizontal – 0.25 inches
4. Bottom Margin: Horizontal – 5.25 inches

3.  Great! Now, repeat the process, this time though use these values below. This will add guidelines to the edge of our document. This is in preparation for adding our bleed.

1. Left Margin: Vertical – 0.25 inches
2. Right Margin: Vertical – 8.25 inches
3. Top Margin: Horizontal – 0.25 inches
4. Bottom Margin: Horizontal – 5.25 inches

4.  Now, to fully implement the bleed space, go to Image -> Canvass size… Add a 0.5 inch value to both the width and the height. You may also want to make sure that the anchor is set to the center so that you divide the additional bleed space around your design.

5.  Once done with the margins, you should have something like this. Note that the outer area is the printing bleed, and the inner margin is for your guidance in design.

6.  Great! Now we start with the design proper. Our first move is to add a color background. We do this by using the gradient color tool. Simple click on the tool to activate it. Then, above in the options bar, click on the gradient box to set your color gradients. Then, just inscribe the color gradient by click dragging across the canvass. Be sure of course to use the right gradient style. We are using a linear style here.

7.  Now, we download a nice pattern. There are a lot of great patterns we choose this pattern.  We download it, and then copy and paste it to our design.

8.  Now, we desaturate this layer. This will actually remove the colors. To do this, simply go Image -> Adjustments -> desaturate. Make sure of course that you have selected our pattern layer when you do this.

9.  Now, change the blend mode of this layer. To do this look for the blend mode settings in the layers panel (top left). Change the blend mode to “Overlay”. You should also reduce the opacity of the layer to 45%.

10.  We will now erase part of the center of the pattern where we will put the text it later. To do this, first click on the eraser tool. Right click on the canvass to bring up the eraser context menu.  Select the soft brush at 300px. Also, in the options bar above, it is important that you reduce the eraser’s opacity to around 60%.

11.  Great! With the eraser brush prepared, just drag the brish across the center of our pattern, This gives us a nice faded effect at the center of the design. This should allow our text to be more visible.

12.  Good, now before we actually the text though, we will first add a few more additional vector shape accents. We download a couple of creative vector brushes from this generous person here. We download it and then install it in Adobe Photoshop.

NOTE that there are tons of other free brushes out there.  To do this, just select the brush tool, right click on the canvass and then click on the right arrow key in the context menu. Choose the option to “load brushes”.

13.  Just navigate to the file that you downloaded and select it for loading. Once done, you should be able to see the new brushes when you select the brush tool, right click on the canvass and browse through the brush category. Usually the latest brushes are at the bottom most rows.

14.  Now, create a new layer for our brush effects. Just press CTRL+SHIFT+N to create this new layer. Then, set your foreground color to a theme color and then start adding creative shape brushes to your design.

15.  We also change the blend mode of this accent layer to “Color Dodge” and then reduce its opacity to 30%.

16.  Great! Now we will be finally adding some of the title text. Make sure that you of course choose your font styles wisely. Just use the text Tool to create your title blocks.

17.  Before we finish though with the main title, double click on it to add some layer styles. IN the layer styles window that opens, click on “Gradient Overlay”. Set the following  settings for the gradient overlay attribute.

1. Opacity: 100
2. Gradient: (2 of your theme color choice)
3. Style: linear
4. Angle: 90 degrees,

18.  Once done with the gradient tool, you should see the seamless color change for the text.

19.  Finally we add the some smaller text details for our design. Here we are using a cleaner font style. Also take note that we will NOT be adding a gradient color layer style here because it is best to have a pure color for the smaller text.

20.  Now, just to add some more details, we add a line divider in between the two lines of text. We just use the LINE SHAPE TOOL here from the layers panel. We set the weight to 2 pixels and on inscribing the line we hold down the SHIFT key to make sure that It gets rendered properly straight.

21.  Finally, we just add the smaller fine print details for our flyer design. We varied some of the font colors here after typing them in so that some of the keywords are highlighted. This is perfect for marketing designs that need key authority people or words to be the first one that people see.

22.  That should finish our elegant and patterned design for color flyers. Hopefully with the tips you have learned, you will know now how you can create something like our flyer.

Author Bio

Kate Manhaven is a graphic artist who works with PrintPlace.com, an online printing company that offers business cards, postcard printing and poster printing services. She spends her free time either wake-boarding or snowboarding whenever the season permits.

Source:

http://www.tutoriallounge.com/2012/07/design-an-elegant-and-patterned-invitation-flyer-in-photoshop/