Lea Maalouf Grade 9 Art IGCSE
Business Card Brief
For my business card, I decided to use Photoshop. I chose the French restaurant, Le Gourmet. The first thing I needed to do was figure out who the target audience. I decided that the profile of the customers would be upper class, middle aged adults who enjoy fine dining. After that, I brainstormed more ideas about how the restaurant would be like. I knew that I wanted it to be classy and elegant. I wanted to have a nice cursive font because that’s what usually comes into my mind when I think of France. I looked through the fonts and decided to use ‘Savoye LET’ and put it in italics because it seemed the most delicate, and neat font. It wasn’t too bold or flashy and wouldn’t give off the impression of a cheap restaurant. I kept in mind that to make a place look expensive, I didn’t want to have a bright, cluttered and busy business card with cartoons on it. It took a while, and some thought process but I finally came up with the idea to use a wine glass as my picture on the business card. I began by searching pictures of wine glasses. This turned out more difficult than I expected since most of the nice images were copyrighted, and I didn’t want to take a risk with the creative commons pictures. I decided that once I got home, I would take a picture myself, so instead I started working on the background for the business card. I had researched many effects on Photoshop, and one effect that I thought looked nice was the gradient effect. I created this by using the gradient tool to have a blue circle in the middle, fading into the black around it. I tried to make it have a cloud/smoky effect, but that didn’t turn out to look good, and the tutorials I found online didn’t help me at all.
Next, I took a picture of a wine glass. The first time I took the picture, the background behind the wine glass was too light, so I couldn’t cut out the picture on Photoshop. The next few tries, I put the wine glass in front of a darker background and put it next to a window to get the lighting correct.
-‐-‐-‐ This was much easier to cut out on Photoshop. After I cut it out and pasted it onto my gradient background, I saw that its color didn’t really match, so I changed the effect to ‘Hard Light’ so that it would blend more with the background. I decided that I wanted to have glowing lines spiraling around it, so I read a few tutorials teaching me how to accomplish that look. First I needed to use the brush tool with the color white and the font of 7px. Then, I drew spiraling lines around my wine glass. Next, I needed to remove some of the lines to give the essence that the lines were going in front and behind the wine glass. I tried to do what the tutorial had said, but it did not work for me so I opted to use another tool. I chose to use the ‘clone stamp tool’, which took a very long time.
Once, I had that I needed to make it glow, so I right clicked on the picture (using the ‘Rectangular Maquee Tool’), selected ‘Blending Options’, then selected ‘Inner Glow’ and ‘Outer Glow’ and made the opacity 30%. I also chose the color to be yellow, so that it would make the picture look more as if it were glowing.
Then, I added small dots (brush size between 1-‐4 px) around the spiraling lines as if they were stars, which gives the picture even more of a glow effect. To make the lines look as if they were in motion, I copied the layer of the wine glass and increased its transparency, and placed it right next to it to give it a slight blur effect.
The last step was to add the text. I used the ‘Savoye LET’ font in italics and wrote the information in French. I included the address and phone number. At first, my font was too small, and I realized that after I printed it out, so I made the font as big as I could while still staying within the boundaries of the blue circle. At first, I had the words “Le Gourmet” under the line, but then I realized that if I put it above the line, it would be emphasized more. This is my final copy:
Business Card Design Plan
Name of Restaurant: Le Gourmet
Target audience: Middle-‐aged adults with high income, who enjoy and appreciate fine dining. Restaurant Look/Ambience: Classy, neat, not cluttered, faded colors (no bright colors). Font: Cursive, italics, not big or bold, and glow
Le Gourmet – too bold Le Gourmet –letters are too curly Le Gourmet –too harsh, and block-‐like Le Gourmet -‐-‐ Good Le Gourmet – too italicized Food: Should be in small portions, there should be a sommelier serving expensive wines.
People: Should dress formal/fancy/dressy, men should wear suits and women should wear dresses. Open hours: at night from 7-‐10 Colors on the business card: -‐Blue -‐Black
Effect: Glowing Lights around the wine glass.
Rough copy: