PART TWO Designing The Energy Drink Can Label

Transcription

1 PART TWO Designing The Energy Drink Can Label Part two of the design process involves the creating the label for the energy drink can with vector graphic techniques using Adobe Illustrator. While the creation and design of the drink can label can be done within Photoshop using bitmap graphic techniques, the text handling capabilities of Illustrator and the way it allows easy creation of logo type designs and line art type images best lends itself to this production stage. NOTE: Before you begin creating your label in Illustrator you should have worked out the design of your drink brand with pencil and paper as instructed and roughed out the position of the required elements for the label. You should have also scanned your brand identity (logo) to use in creating your label. The dimensions of the label will 188mm wide and 143mm high. Sketch out a rectangle, and using the downloaded can resources from the Fronter space as reference, work out the position of your can brand and tagline on half of the can area. On the other half decide positions for the nutrition list, ingredients list, the caffeine warning description, a back story (if wanted), bar code, recycle graphic, manufacturing info, refund in SA & NT, best before text, a web address and possibly social media icons and other information you might like to add. See below for an example of a label mock up and also examine our energy can resources for layout ideas for this information.

2 Step 1 Getting Started Open Illustrator. Go to the File > New menu and create a new document (file work area or artboard) with the settings of width = 188mm, height = 143mm and color mode set to RGB. Step 2 Create Label Guides Press Ctrl +R on keyboard to set up rulers. Rename the base layer guide. Click and drag from the vertical ruler to drag out a guide and position it at the 94mm position. See below. This divides the label area in two. Half for can brand and half for all the product information on the back of the label. 2

3 Step 3 Place Brand Identity Scan Lock the guide layer and create a new layer called template and move this under the guide layer. Use the File > Place option to place your scanned identity idea into Illustrator. Scale down if need to fit on half the can label area. See below for example. Step 4 Create Layers For Elements and Build Identity Use vector drawing techniques build your brand identity. Make sure each part is on its own layer and try to make sure each part is a closed shape as this will make adding colour fills etc. so much easier. Layer order is really important here. 3

4 Step 5 Open Pantone Swatch Library To Choose Colour Scheme Now make sure you have selected your colour scheme from the reference book Color: Messages And Meaning and have noted the numbers of the colours. These are needed to load the colours into the Swatches panel. Click in the top right hand corner of the Swatches panel then choose Open Swatch Library > Color Books > Pantone + Solid Coated. Step 6 Load Colours Into Swatch Panel Firstly type in the Pantone number for your first selected colour and press Enter. The colour swatch is now highlighted among the colour squares. Click on the highlighted colour to load it into the Swatches Panel for future use. Repeat this for the other two colours in your selected set. 4

5 Step 7 Bevel Base Polygon Create a new layer just above the template layer called label colour Select one of your three Pantone swatches to be the main background colour of your label and use the Rectangle tool to create a filled colour rectangle. Step 8 Add Text To Front Of Can Label Create new layers for the text elements you would like to add to the front part of your label. See here how the second of the three main colours has been used for the brand name. NOTE: You can go to a site like dafont.com to select a special font for your brand if you like and get it installed on your workstation. 5

6 Step 9 Create Content On Back Of Label Using the assets for the back of the label from our Fronter site and also your plan of where they will be set them out on the back of the can. This about the type of font to use and how you can separate elements on appropriate layers. Also use Guides to help you position the various elements of the label back. Step 10 If need be you can add some vector or bitmap based special effects. Here a lens flare brush shape saved as a Photoshop file has been loaded using File > Place behind the mule image to enhance the popped eye look of the mule. 6

7 Step 11 When the label is complete to your satisfaction it has to be exported in readiness for loading into 3DS Max. Go to File > Save For Web. When the dialogue box opens set with to Bitmaps is 3DS MAX work best f you can get them in as close as possible to multiples of 256. Choose the JPG format as file type and click Save. Step 12 Save the file into your Energy Can project in the maps folder. This is the place to save all your bitmaps for this project. 7

8 The design of the can label is now complete. The next part will be applying the label and aluminium metal textures, creating the lighting and setting up a camera. 8