Friday 21 April 2017

The Making of TWS Banner

One thing that I have developed over the years since the reign of Banner Mania is an affinity for composing graphic arts. The motivating factor behind is fun. While I find it not so hard to do, I don’t claim that I’m good in this niche. But on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s fairly reasonable to say that I’m somewhat comfortable being sited in one’s judicious perception of what the average skill is.

Which is probably close to 5.


This is my design for the banner that we’re planning to temporarily put up in our display room. TWS stands for Total Workplace Supplies and it’s pretty much an emerging company in Papua New Guinea. The initial aim for the banner is to provide our visitors with an instant way of knowing what we’re dealing of. The man sanitizing his hand with what has come out of a Purell sanitizer on the wall is a subtle hint for children that the clear liquid in the bottle is not meant for drinking.  

Actually, I’m just kidding.

A more subtle hint is that when you see a smiling man happily sanitizing his hand before a liquid dispenser, it's probably tempting to say, "Wait, it's not lunch yet?"



I borrowed this photo from the Gojo website. I’m hoping that they won’t mind because we’re actually trying to promote their interesting range of products, which you are most likely to see being used in the office premises and in the lavatories of hotel rooms. 


I have also borrowed one photo from a Google search result, this is what I used for the background.


I was actually browsing for some royalty free photos online but our staff has voluntarily offered that we use his photo instead. So here, we made our own little photo-session in the office. 

He looks more than happy for getting this much attention, I reckon. 


Out of those eight photos, we have chosen this. All of the photos are actually nice but the angle and shades in this photo just fell on the right places. What remains of the other photos is immediately perceived of as the casualty of a propitious photo-shoot.

Oh, by the way, the guy’s name is Stanley.


Here, I’m trying to work out a Photoshop magic. The picture of the office is slightly tilted to the left and is applied with Gaussian Blur of 38.3 pixels. The purpose of which is to create an illusion of depth once in place behind Stanley’s photo.


Next, we’ll remove the background from this photo to prepare it for compositing. I used the Adobe Photoshop’s pen tool to manually trace over an imaginary line around Stanley. The Bezier curve with points above Stanley's hand is an example of how I control the flow of the curves with a pen tool.

A few notable settings that I use when cutting off the background are the following:

Feather = 1
Smoothing = 3
Selection Expand or Contract = 5


Here’s the final image after compositing. I played around and made some changes in Hues and Saturation, Color Balance, Levels and Curves to create an impression that the three different images are of the same photo. The last adjustment I made to this banner was a Warming Photo Filter (85) with a density of 6%.


Printing banners on the canvass is not much of a problem in Port Moresby. The major players in this field are the Colour Boys, Theodist, Moores Printing, Creative Arts and Tiger Signage. The photo above is in the workplace of Tiger Signage.

Have a good day everyone!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...