Southern Composition

We have now hosted 5 arts arcata events since we have been open. These events are great and we have been getting a larger and larger turnout for them every time. This is great and all but it does lead to more problems like stolen merchandise, plastic cups littering the road, and gaggles of people in the stock room smoking out (most of whom I have never seen before). So I decided it's time to crack down (especially since the upcoming arts arcata is somewhat of a sensitive matter- local graff artists I'm sure the pd will be interested in).

It took me a while to think about how to go about this & it finally just hit me- pow- right in the kisser (not really, but I almost never get to say that!). BACKSTAGE/VIP PASSES!!! Dooi- how could I not have thought about that for 2 whole weeks? So I googled the dimensions (2.6x4.7) and went to work in Photoshop.

I knew that the passes had to have the store name & logo along with our clothing lines logo's but that was just the easy part... The pass started off saying MEMBER but I thought that would just encourage the idea that we are a dispensary (FYI- we are not!) so I changed it to STAFF. I also knew that I wanted red on the pass so I picked a red as close to our T-shirts as possible.

The background was the final step. I played around with solid color background but they just didn't give me the pop/professional look I wanted. So I started working with pics I normally use for textures & was going to layer the textures with a solid background. Once I tried a metal countertop image the deal was sealed.

The passes were starting to look like large dog tags- Not my intention but still pretty cool! However the text and logo's still looked flat and dull. Suddenly I remembered my Photoshop video's and thought of the layer properties box. I started playing around with the embossing feature and settled with pillow embossing. I was amazed- it was just what the passes needed & the logo's and text stood out like it had been stamped on the metal. They are being printed and laminated as I type this.

Pretty good for my first try at actually designing something pro-fession-al looking, although I'm sure in about 6 months I'll look back at them and go- "ew- what was I thinking, that is so amataur looking" but for now I LOVE them!!

I went in and added a "do not duplicate" watermark on the one I was posting online so that it couldn't be downloaded and printed by just anyone... Now I just have to find about 10-20 black cheapo lanyards & we are in biz-nazz...