Button it up!

Upon ACA Ps Creative Cloud certification, approved students shall have access to button production.

Download "Template for Buttons" below and produce school appropriate button designs using Ps. You can also hand draw buttons on the template after printing.

Project Scenario:

One CRITICAL thing you need to learn to work with is different printing formats and understanding the concept of “Safe zones and bleed.” Bleed is when you need the background image of your work to extend past the edges of your art so that it can be trimmed, or formed around the edge of the object you’re printing on. This makes it so that the end product does not show the edges of your art on the medium. An example would be your ink jet printer… you know how it leaves a border around the edges? If you want to print an 8.5×11 inch print with NO border at all, you have to print on larger paper and then cut out your image. That border is there because printers need to have an edge of the paper to grab to roll it through the machine.

Safe zones are when you know you’ll be cutting the edges off of a print, making sure that your important parts of the image aren’t cut. The paper is normally cut in bulk, and sometimes the paper shifts a little, and if it’s going in a frame, frames aren’t perfect sizes… so keep the important parts of your image away from the edge so that it doesn’t get cut or covered by the frame.

In this project, you’ll also have to design in a circle… and that’s a unique challenge as well!!!

Project Objective:

Create Buttons using safe zones and bleed.

Specifications:

  • Design Buttons using your Ps skills.

  • Open the Button Template using Ps.

  • Use school appropriate images, self-made or copied

  • Use the 'Adjustments' under the 'Image' pull down menu to refine and sharpen each button

  • Save your work as a .psd doc. when complete

  • Save your work as a .jpeg file (this will be used for printing)

  • Print your .jpg because you will need to print the .jpg file at 100% - (scroll down the print window to locate "Scale" - (type in 100 instead of the default 96)

  • Print your images using the color printer with copy paper, not card stock

  • Capture an image of your 12 buttons using your phone and upload the image to your Google Slides.

Materials/Equipment:

  • Pencil/paper

  • Computer Workstation

  • Graphics software (Photoshop, Illustrator)

  • Button Maker

Evaluation:

Is the image original? Did you create 12 buttons?