Erica Joy Decker

How to Rapidly Develop Graphics for a Client on a Deadline

This summer, I had to create 36 banners for BreastCancer.org, including original designs, mockups, feedback, and revisions, in only 54 hours… and I did it. The solution? Learn every Photoshop shortcut you possibly can. The quality of your designs is somewhat irrelevant to this since that only comes with lots of practice developing graphics, but there are ways that you can speed up the process by which you create your designs.

For instance, one of my favorite Photoshop tools is the Automator. When you’re designing images and banners for the web, they all have to be optimized, and BreastCancer.org, in particular, requests that each banner be under 40kb. To individually optimize each banner would take probably close to two hours; time I didn’t have. Instead, I optimized one while recording my actions, and then hit play for each banner after that. It took me less than 5 minutes to optimize all of them.

For reference, the Automator for Photoshop CS4 is located in your toolbar right below your history. All you have to do is create a new recording, name it, click okay, do whatever you want to your image, click stop, and then click play for every other image that you want to repeat the same actions for.

Another shortcut that I’ve found is useful when working with stock images. If you’re using an image from a site like iStock Photos, you don’t want to purchase it before the design is approved, especially for a client like BreastCancer.org, who may turn down an image because the girl is too young or rosy, or because a sleeping person actually looks dead to them (they’re careful about upsetting their audience – breast cancer patients). Instead, you use a watermarked image to begin with. This is a hassle since you have to then recreate the design later with the purchased image, so a nice little shortcut is to drag any layer masks you have on the stock image to the new, purchased image. Voila! You just cut out some redundant work.

Another probably obvious solution is to get used to using keyboard shortcuts. It’s a lot faster to press command + s than to go through the menus to save your work. Common shortcuts I use include:

Command + s: save
Command + Shift + s: save for web
Command + z: undo
Command + y: redo
Command + c: copy
Command + v: paste
Control + right-click with a tool selected: size and hardness dialogue

Since I work with Photoshop a lot, I end up working with lots and lots of layers. After a few times not remembering what is what, I learned the importance of named, ordered, and grouped layers. This can save an immense amount of time looking for the layers you need to edit.

One other simple related tool that I only recently discovered is if you right-click the visibility toggle on the layers palette, you can assign a color to a layer or group of layers, making them stand out from the rest and easier to find.

Well, that’s it! I hope these tools will be useful for other people. If you have success with it, let me know!

Tags: linkedin

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Categories: Clients, Graphic Design.