How To Make A Great Greeting Card [Photoshop Guide]

This is part 4 of a four-part blog series on working with fonts in Adobe Creative Cloud.

In this article we’ll look at creating a simple greetings card from scratch in Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Fonts (formerly called TypeKit) is a font subscription service. Adobe Fonts can be tied into webpages with the use of CSS and JavaScript.

Using Adobe Fonts, fonts can be linked together and associated with each other. Adobe Fonts has brought on a new evolution in the world of typography.

Today we are going to be trying out something simple: Using Adobe Fonts to assist in the creation of a Greeting Card.

Adobe Color Wheel is a web application that assists in finding pairing and colours that go well together.

This tutorial requires an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription so that you can access Adobe Photoshop.

Find the previous entries here:

Part 1 – Using Glyph Alternates

Part 2 – Creating Your Own Glyphs

Part 3 – Creating Ligatures & Colour Alternates

 

Creating The Initial Card

To begin, open Photoshop and create a new document that is 5” wide, 7” high. Give it a resolution of 150, and make sure all other settings match the ones in Figure 1 before clicking Create.

Hit Shift + Ctrl + N to create a New Layer, and then click OK in the window that comes up.

Now, double-click where indicated below to bring up the Color Picker Window.

In the Color Picker Window, type fbaf5f where circled in red below, and then click Ok to leave the Color Picker Window. Working with colours digitally is covered in our beginners Photoshop.

***Your foreground colour will now be this specific orange. Your foreground colour is the main colour you work with. If you want to alternate between your foreground colour and your background colour, you can tap X on the keyboard to do so.***

Our next step is to make this colour the background of our card.

Press SHIFT + Backspace to open up a Fill window. The fill option by default is “foreground colour”, which is exactly what we need. Click Ok to accept and leave the Fill window.

This is the part of the tutorial where Adobe Fonts comes in.

 

Creating The Text

At the top of the Photoshop Window, click Type, and then Select “Add Fonts from TypeKit…” from the dropdown window.

This will open up the Fonts Web Page in your Default Browser. The Fonts Web Page includes a search bar that will be enormously useful for the purposes of our creation.

So, how do we find fonts that fit what we are looking for, without searching mindlessly? And how do we use these fonts in Photoshop once we have chosen them? The answer: Easily.

We know that we need fonts that will look well in a card, and so we should type in the search box: “card”. Then click the magnifying glass to the left of the search bar.

Scrolling down to the bottom of the subsequent webpage, we will notice (as of the time this tutorial was made) 3 packs. A Business Card pack, a Résumé pack, and a Grad Announcement pack.

As it happens, the Grad Announcement pack has the exact same vibe we’re looking for. It also features the exact sort of curvy title font I had in mind. Click it.

In the webpage that comes up, click Get These Fonts. A Web Page will come up that notifies you that these fonts are “syncing”.

Once completed, you will observe there is an option to manually download these fonts. That won’t be necessary. You can leave the Web Page and go back to Adobe Photoshop.

In Photoshop, press X to switch background and foreground colors, and then hit T on your keyboard to select the text tool, and then click anywhere in the document. Type Get Well Soon! and then click the checkmark circled in red in Figure 7 to leave text editing mode.

Once you are no longer in text-editing mode, press V, and make sure Auto-Select and Show Transform Controls are turned on.

You can now play around with the text until it is a size you want. Remain to hold down Shift when resizing to retain proportions, and if you mess up, don’t worry, you can always undo with Ctrl + Z.

Time to change the font. Hit T, Click on your text, then select all of it, and go to the font drop-down.

The great thing about choosing fonts in almost any Adobe program for design is that there is a special Filter Feature that allows you to filter Fonts by categories based on their features, as well as other data.

This is extraordinarily useful and saves us from the hassle of having to go through 100’s of fonts to get the 2 or 3 that we really want.

We can filter out all font except for the Adobe Fonts fonts, which we will do now by clicking the TypeKit icon circled in Figure 10.

If your Adobe Fonts was previously empty, it’ll now probably look something like Figure 11, i.e. our 10 Grad Pack fonts plus a few others.

Choose Rename Script and then click on the checkmark to leave type editing mode.

The title looks good… but there is a problem.

 

Centring And Formatting The Text

It is not centred!

Press V and then Alt + Ctrl + A to select all layers. Then click on the fifth alignment icon.(Figure 13)

Sometimes alignment has unintended results…

As you can see from above,  the Title is now centred, but now it and the fill layer are both too far to the right.

No problem. You can drag them both leftwards, and it should snap to the documents outline.

We want to give the font a colour that goes well with the orange fill.

This is where the Adobe Color Wheel comes in. You can open it at this link: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

Using the drop-down on the left of the window, change the colour harmony to Complementary.

After you’ve done that, you can change the HEX of the left-most colour to fbaf5f.

After this, you will see 3 oranges and 2 blues. We will use the left-most blue now for the font. We will save the oranges for later.

By scrolling down on the page, we can see that the left-most blue has a HEX of 006EB2.

Go back into Photoshop, and let’s make this our next foreground colour, using the same method that we used at the beginning of the tutorial.

After that, highlight your text with the text tool, click the colour square in the Text Bar, and after that click on our blue foreground colour which is at the bottom left of the window.

Afterwards, click Ok to leave the Color Picker window, and then click the checkmark to leave text editing mode. Working with text is part of the agenda on our introduction to Photoshop classes.

The card looks very empty still. Let’s fill it up!

 

Final Touches

We are going to use the shape tool to make a brush. Make a new Photoshop document that is 5” x 5”.

Right-click the Rectangle Tool in the Toolbar, and then select the Custom Shape Tool.

In the Custom Shape Tool Bar at the top of the screen, you can choose from a host of options. Choose the heart.

Make a heart. Then go to Edit > Define Brush Preset > Ok.

Go back to our colour wheel and retrieve the HEX from the second orange colour. It’s FF8F19.

Once you have it, return to our greeting card document in Photoshop. Make the HEX we copied into the new foreground colour.

Afterwards, create a new layer. Then, press B to select the brush tool.

Our brush will be the one that appears. Click randomly on the document to place down hearts, keeping in mind aesthetic.

This is my final result: