Preserved Topic: commercial artwork

I'm thinking I'm finished messing with the look of the image in the link below. Can you guys give me a critique on this? It's designed for print and the original image is 9.25"x11.25" @ 150dpi. The image linked below is about 85kb (those with poor bandwidth connections, be forewarned!).


http://www.alltel.net/~gemberling/images/cover-copy.jpg

Hey K-Tel I remember that outfit! (sorry only kidding)

It looks ok to me. Is it a cover for a mailing or what?

Nice swirly BG. I don't think the people you made it for have ANYTHING to bitch about. It's just plain good. People of their kind aren't waiting for flashy graphics or such, and this looks really clean.

The artwork is going to be laserprinted by a print shop and laminated with a 10mil crystal coat laminate and wiro punched on the left hand side for binding. It will be the cover to a quotation package. I know that people don't generally give a shit about the graphics but our competition turns in quotes on Excel spreadsheets (unbound). We've received comments from our customers that our quotes are heads above the rest as far as quality goes. Our quotes cost us about $25.00 a copy.

BTW, I love your sig Mahjqa. How did you create it?

The background is actually a 1"x1" wallpaper image that I 'free transform/scale(d)' to fit the large size of my image. Then I did several gaussian blurs to smooth it out (16, 8, 4, 2, 1). I also did some lighting effects on it and copied the layer to a new layer, changed it to 'screen' and lowered the opacity to 50%.

This past week I bought a new video card ( http://www.3dlabs.com/product/card/oxygen_gvx210/oxygen_gvx210.htm ) and since is a dual head video card I plugged my two NEC P1250+'s into it side by side. This made working in Photoshop "dreamy" (we're talking a resolution of 2560x1024). I set up my image on the left hand monitor and I undocked all my tool bars and tiled them side by side on the right hand monitor. God it's so much easier to get work done when you have that much desktop.

F1, when you say, 'it looks ok to me' is that like 'it looks adequate to me' or 'it kinda ***, but I don't wanna be rude and tell you that to your face'....

That looks pretty cool, Boudga!

My only comments, and, not knowing how much bigger the output will be, is that the text along the top is a little difficult to read. Not enough contrast. But that could be me. The rest looks awesome.

Pat Richard
Web weenie
http://www.gurusnetwork.com
ICQ 23113317

The .jpg image of the original image is distorted terribly due to the compression.