Top Gear Series 18 Micro-site Retouching
on Apr 13 in Retouching, Web Design tagged Creative Retouch, Photoshop, web
R&B Creative recently built the fantastic Top Gear series 18 website and I had the pleasure of retouching together the four hero scenes. A special mention goes out to Mark (Art Director) and Adam (Designer) for leaving me with lovely Photoshop files to work with.
Stepping through the following images I’ll give you a peek into what goes into a composition like this.
Rough background composition
The first step is bringing together all the various background elements and merging them all together. This background is made up of about 5 images.
Finalise the background with a cracked edge feature
Next the broken away front edge was added. In the finished site it made for a transition from imagery to content.
Add a car
Top Gear wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for fast cars, so naturally the next element to add is the hero car.
Make the car part of the composition
Here I took the clipped out still life image of the car and added motion to the wheels, a dash of smoke to the rear tires, and grounding shadow. Grounding shadows really help when you are trying to avoid the ‘primary school scrap book’ look.
The car will look faster if the Stig is inside
Of course we needed the Stig onboard… I mean, it’ll look a little silly to have a ‘moving’ car with no driver.
Masking the Stig
Some careful masking resulted in the Stig sitting nicely in position, but let still requiring some work to sell the composition.
And it’s done!
After a great deal of colour correction and various lighting enhancements to the Stig and that remained was to add a Top Gear licence plate and the retouch was complete.
If you haven’t checked out the Top Gear Series 18 website yet, head over there now… (If you connect to the interwebs with dial-up you might as well make a nice cup of tea and consider the benefits of a high-speed internet connection while you wait for the site to load.)
Recent logos – Vol. 1
on Apr 13 in Branding tagged Identity, Logo
A sampling of logos I have created in recent times.
Smooth Colour Proof Evaluation With Lighting Indicator Stickers
on Apr 06 in News tagged Catalogue, Digital Proofing
Checking my emails this morning I found a nifty product announcement message awaiting me from the Pantone® team. If you have spent any time in your career working with digital proofing—and colour correction in particular—you will be excited about the possibilities of this product as I am.
Introducing the all new… D50 Lighting Indicator Stickers by Pantone®
These amazing little stickers tell you at a glance whether your ambient lighting conditions are right for accurate colour evaluation.
As you can see in the image above, each sticker consists of two light-sensitive strips that will match under D50 range lighting (aka 5000k). If the lighting is not in that range the two strips will appear different.
This is going to be a real help with client sign-off in scenarios when colour matching an image that is to appear in a mail-order clothing catalogue to the actual fabric or garment sample. So now when the client receives the digital contract proof and thinks that perhaps a colour is a little off, we now have a way to establish if ambient lighting conditions are to blame. Handy.
For more info head over to the Pantone® website.
Font Find – RBNo2
on Feb 27 in News tagged Fonts
In my wonderings around the internet I stumbled upon this fantastic new font—RBNo2—that I just seem to really love. And with the ‘light’ and ‘light alternative’ version being completely free, what’s not to love!
I can’t wait to use this font, and I am sure that I won’t have to wait long before I receive project that needs the tone of voice that this font offers.
Check it out for yourself here.
BBC Hubs website nominated for AIMIA award
on Jan 16 in News tagged Agency, AwardsR&B Creative has been nominated as finalist in two categories at the upcoming 2012 AIMIA Awards.
I was privileged to have a hand in designing the multi-region BBC Hubs website, which is a finalist in the Best News, Reference or Media category. It is certainly a treat to see my name listed there along with the other super talented people at R&B. I also got the amazing opportunity to design the mobile version to the BBC Hubs website, and I am looking forward to releasing a new gallery entry for the mobile site in the very near future.
