Right, and the response is that graphic design isn’t about artistic fun; it’s about advancing the clients’ business objectives. If you’re making art, then just make art. If you’re making art for clients who need graphic design, that’s a disservice, whether you and they know it or not.
So again—no—more sophisticated, InDesign-like typographical controls are not available for, nor applicable to, Photoshop or any raster image editor. I’d again assert that your ask for finer type control is contrary to your stated intention to subsequently mangle that type.
Illustrator used to have an interesting effect I believe, where you could have a paragraph of text through which you run a brush across… and it pushes away the letter as if you ran a spoon through water that creates a vortex.
You could place a linked Illustrator file into photoshop, but you’d have to rasterize it most likely in order to pull off the effects you’re mentioning. But I’d imagine any of it would have to be rasterized at that point.
I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share even a sample of what you’re trying to accomplish, there may already be alternate ways of doing it in InDesign or Illustrator. Even if it’s a small snippet of an example.
Sorry HotButton,
we would not agree. Graphic design always evolves just like art. Why your graphic design layouts don’t look like the books from the Medieval ages? To say that there should be a clear distinction between art and graphic design is to have some predetermined ideas of what should not be done in graphic design. Keep in mind that your design of today would probably be rejected if you showed it to a graphic designer from hundred years ago, because you are using up-to-date concepts and ideas that are trendy now. The history of art is one giant progress from one phase to another, and everybody gets influenced by everybody else and so on. I doubt if the artists and the publications that I mentioned would be pleased to hear you that theirs is not graphic design.
Well, I didn’t say exactly that, but in any case, I would indeed contend that when a graphic designer accepts a client’s money for services, there are fiduciary responsibilities assumed in the providing of those services and the prudent development of an effective result. And I’d definitely add that those responsibilities include identifying and avoiding many, many things that should not be done.
Interesting you’d unknowingly infer that, given your own descriptions of your work. Truly, if you knew, you’d see that my work is anything but “trendy.”
Raygun magazine covers and layouts, Creative Typography Layouts, Skateboarding and Surf magazine layouts, Adbusters, David Carson, Gmunk, Anthony Neil Dart.
Yup, I got that. I grew up in the era of Raygun, David Carson and the like. I’m just curious if you can share a snippet of what you’ve created. Even a cropped portion, just to gauge what can and cant be done outside of Photoshop.
Well, you could do some of what you’ve shown in Illustrator to a degree, I think using what you’ve shown more as a main illustration, but handling the long text articles in InDesign with having your “illustrations” be linked would probably work out. Based on your samples I don’t see the need for the level of fine tuned typographic control.
Just-B,
that’s my cat there looking. No, have not had clients for this type of work.
You may like this guy’s work – tons of amazing stuff Anthony Neil Dart.
CraigB,
let me ask you because I have not used InDesign in a century. Can InDesign let me control the transparency or the blending options of individual letters if all the letters are part of one paragraph (one text box/shape)? What I will do in Photoshop, if I want one of the letters in a word to be differently blended, I will put it on a separate layer, which obviously makes me work longer on making that, but if InDesign can let me blend individual letters with different blending option, then I might considering the switch.
And does InDesign blend layers with the same good effects that Photoshop gives me?
Another benefit to using Photoshop is that I constantly move shapes around… so if I am in InDesign, I will not be able to do that because the background will be one giant image mixed with tons of layers of different shapes and letters. The background will be one giant PDF, so if I want to rework the background I will have to go back to Photoshop to edit there. That leaves me working with 2 different programs as opposed to 1.
Personally, I think InDesign would be a terribly frustrating tool for what you’re doing, and it would have no real benefits that couldn’t be better achieved using Illustrator.
InDesign is built around the premise of putting together multi-page documents that contain blocks of text, require consistency from one page to the next and is able to efficiency get it all done. It’s not really a free-form art tool.
The only problem I see with Photoshop is the whole resolution issue. You’re basically fixed at the size you make it, which might not be a problem. But if you (or a client) ever need to print these out at something approaching wall-size, they’ll be blurry. Large, blurry photos can work, typography, on the other hand, just looks bad when the appropriate resolution isn’t there to support it.
If it were me, I’d use Illustrator when possible and Photoshop where it isn’t.
Not really, depending on what you mean (I could be misunderstand what you wrote). Placed raster images obviously have a fixed resolution, but any vector elements added in InDesign or Illustrator remain independent of the resolution of those placed images.
This is really really good illustrative work!
This explains a lot!
But the part where you say this is a magazine…I may still be misunderstanding what you are trying to achieve.
I would still do the page layout in Indesign, placing this imagery into a layout and if you have article text to accompany this, I’d do that part in Indesign.
You don’t want to be designing magazine text in Photoshop if you want this to be a professionally produced piece. Not even if it is a web magazine.
Just-B, I meant magazine pictures; if they are 300 dpi, then that’s it. If the client wants to blow up the magazine layout to a trade show banner – then the image of the photo deteriorates. I understand that text, InDesign elements and Illustrator vectors are preserved… By the way, I always wished they made every pixel in Photoshop to be a vector too… but that’s beyond me – I guess the math or the computation doesn’t cut it yet… Maybe one day when we have quantum computers there will be lossless resolution.
