I am new to making banners or headers or whatever they are called and would like some feedback on the one I made for my new website. Please keep in mind, I'm not that great with photoshop, and don't know how to do alot of fancy tricks. So here it is:



Please be honest, and straight-forward. I can take the criticizim.

hey you gotta start somewhere, right? although your not to sharp in the program, which can be changed; you understand the concept of a banner, to gain attention and add professionalism to your establishment, many experienced photoshoppers dont even understand that and it shows. So keep at it and it should turn out pretty killer. If you need any help or have any questions go ahead and ask. heres a few of mine.





yeah tho although it doesnt look to hot, it almost wanted to make me start over and take html .ha.

This post has been edited by mirdux: Oct 1 2006, 05:19 AM

Well, if you want honesty, I'll give it too ya! It is VERY basic! But I'll give you a little hint to help you spice it up. Just go to http://www.good-tutorials.com and find something that looks good. They have TONS of photoshop tutorials and almost anything there can be modified to suit your needs! I'm ALWAYS there looking for things. Eventually, you'll learn a lot about photoshop and you'll be able to do really cool things with it on your own! Keep trying! I see potential in your banner!

[N]F

I agree. Very simple. Not only that but the text looks bad. There's little dots where you reduced the file size for jpeg. If you want a good looking image try saving as a png.

Look into tutorials. I like it. But maybe fade from an image on the left side (full image) to a light blue. Maybe a yellow bar with rounded edges and a little different font.

Good job though. I'm telling you this from someone that can't do anything in PS, so I don't know if I'm telling you right lol. As was said before, you have to start somewhere.

you could make some of the objects less defined. like a fade or drop shadow under effects. A fade is basically duplicating the layer of whatever you want to fade, reducing the opacity to 5o and moving it somewhere behind th main object to contrast it more. I found doing this to key words works best. an example is the bottom part of the redesign notice on my website. mirduxband.com . it uses multiple fades that are arranged to give the text a meaner look. Hell while im at it. the "mirdux" is simply motion blurred in a separate layer and set behind, creating a 3d effect, the flames just are a red,then orange,then yellow line outlining the text in a separate layer, then you just use smidge on bout 56% strength and just think of flames and twirl away. making more than 1 layers of flames gives it a 3d effect. For the date, its just plain old text, i just took a while rectange in a layer in front of it, put it about 1/2 way over the letters, selected the letters, then selected inverse and deleted the part of the white box that wasnt touching the letters. From there i just lowered the opacity. Redesign is just a really low opacity text.

If youd like i have a zip with a alot of creative fonts... and when i say alot i mean it.. it can help be more creative i guess..

Being new to photoshop, work quality such as that is expected. It's very basic and boring. The image quality is very bad.. Which version of Photoshop are you using because Photoshop shouldn't produce an image quality so bad unless it's below version 7 or so (maybe not even). I like the description about your site though, you should keep that.

you should try using the filter effects and text effects such as drop shadow, those always look good. So keep making some more and soon you'll get better.

I tried a couple of different things in photoshop but I don't think they came out the way they should look for a website. I was looking for more opinions though. Sorry about the size, I tried to resize them in photoshop and it went all screwy. Anyway here they are:

1.

2.

3.

- the outer glow you added to the objective text actually makes the letters really obtrusive and doesnt really help the flow of things. Id reccomend a smooth glow effect rather than a really rough one

-In the second article, your text interferes with your title. survey sais..... no good.

- Possibly, and i mean POSSIBLY, consider animating it, it can make life alot easier by just having one frame say "learn scripting...the beginning", one say "with an.....approach" followed with and lingered on "HTMLect". it makes it easier also for you can be creative with colors and not worry about them counterracting eachother, for there in completely different captions.

I did some revamping to my banner. I used some text effects I found on a website called pixel2life, and I thought it came out pretty good. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the writing underneath it though. I left it white to bring out the statement, and I didn't want to make the page to chaotic with alot of colors. Here is the new background.

Actually, I like the last banner quite a lot. Yes, it still could be much improved, but as it is, it's not bad. But here's a couple of pointers:


1) I'm not sure what that effect is called exactly, but you might wanna try to lessen the glow *sweep*. You know, try to make the "HTMLets-Made-Easy" a little less bright AND ease up a bit on the brush used.


2) Perhaps it'd be better to either decrease the font size of the white text or increase that of the headline itself to make a distinction between the name and the tagline. I personally prefer decreasing the font size of the white text, since the text is of the headline is fine as it is, I think.


Hopefully that will help out along the way . Cheers.