Photoshop Archive

The latest project on LoL is Final Fantasy VI: Five Script Blitz, a video/article series where Mato compares five FF6 scripts all at once. We needed a name and logo for ~branding~, so I set to work.

At first, it was called “Five Script Mix”. I’m still learning the basics of design, so here’s the first process:

Mato wasn’t a fan of the gradient, and we also tweaked the name a bit, so this was the next one:

Perfect! Forever done. It’s the template we’ll use for all of them. Here’s day 2:

Buuuuut, wow Day 2 looks way too same-y when compared to Day 1. We gotta make a change. I tried to incorporate a screenshot that would best sum up each day, and it was messy at first:

Looking better, but the text on the bottom felt too busy and out of place. So I did another tweak:

Yeah!!! We got it!! … except …. There’s a typo in “comparison”. Well, gotta fix that:

Yessss, now we finally got it! This is the style we’ll use for the rest of the project.

Had fun making this new thumbnail for one of Mato’s old Ghosts n Goblins articles :B

… my ン looks like a ソ 🙁 Time to practice my handwriting more!

Mato stayed up late last night working on the latest article about what Japanese fans think of the Pkmn G/S Spaceworld leak. He posted a possible thumbnail in the work chat and said “i tried but this is the best I can do 🙁 ” and asked for me or Tony to improve it. Here’s the pic Mato posted:

And then Tony, being a professional graphic designer and a lover of all things font, came up with this before I even woke up!

Mato & I are very grateful to have Tony on our team~~

I’m almost completely done with making thumbnails for the 250+ games we have listed on the site. It was an easy matter of getting shots of the title screens for every game and editing them to be thumbnail size.

A few games caused problems, though. Like that arcade game called Download. It’s almost impossible to search for on the googs. And then there’s Ninja Gaiden X, which was a mobile phone game released in Japan in 2004 and it no longer exists. This is the only title screen I was able to find for it (yeah, that’s the biggest size too):

So I definitely had to remake it from scratch for the thumbnail. With my trusty drawing tablet and growing knowledge of Photoshop effects, I came up with this:

Ta-da! It would have taken too long to learn how to do a fire effect for a simple thumbnail that almost nobody will see, so I went with the glowy effect instead. I gained some experience points!

Poe: What’s with this thumbnail?

Mato: I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do.
Poe: What’s that behind him?
Mato: Shopping carts from Target.
Poe: Why?!
Mato: I don’t know, it’s a free stock photo. Please make a better one.
Poe: Okay I’ll try.

Poe: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m almost done with all the new series thumbnails for the site! But until I get there, I better wake my brain up. I keep making weird mistakes…

I was working on a thumbnail for an upcoming gallery today. I’m not great at Photoshop, but I can do simple edits. I agonized over the text and speech bubble in this image for sooooo long, picking the right font, the right weight, the right spacing, etc etc. I used Photoshop’s default speech bubble shape, so I had to make the text fit inside and look good and eye-catching:

I knew something was off, but I didn’t know what. Then my friend Nina, a professional comics penciler, shared some speech bubble tips with me and taught me a neat Photoshop trick. With her help, I was able to make this!

It ain’t perfect, but it’s better than what it was! Learn something new every day~