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Good typography consists of just doing what’s right. Knowing what’s right takes some education and intuition. You’re getting some good education here but keep developing your intuition. It’s important to keep learning from everything you see. When people say ‘that’s nice’ and throw it down..you LOOK and study the design and think how you could re-produce it in Photoshop. It will help you grow.

You can select any layer in the layers palette and move it with the Move tool. You can nudge it with the arrow keys on your keyboard. In a clipping group like this, moving the bottom layer will move the entire clipping group. Selecting the layer that is clipped (in the L palette), you can move it ‘within’ the clipping group or layer beneath it (try it out).

Now add some more text. We want to fill this empty space over here because this is a street team’s magazine packed with tons of info. As a designer for this kind of promotion, it is going to be filled with lots of text so you have to make sure that everything you do ‘complements’ or has room for LOTS of text.

You can add some more text down here for your cover design. This should be the main elements of your mini-magazine. I’m adding a slightly darker stroke to this one layer text. As long as we’re in the same color theme, it just makes things more interesting by using these similar elements. Using bright pink probably wouldn’t work as well in this case. Can you see what I mean?

To touch up the design a little bit more you can create some adjustment layers. I was thinking that the bitmap couple just looked a little bland so I decided to do a Curves adjustment layer (make sure that their layer is selected with marching ants to create the adjustment layer right above it).
 

I’ve also created another adjustment/fill layer with gradient fill making sure that my foreground color was black first. With this fill layer you can go outside the dialog box and drag the fill itself to where you like it (how sweet).

Looking at the layers palette you can tell that I’ve used a custom adjustment layer by selecting the “layer 2” by Ctrl/Cmd clicking it first and then creating and adjustment/fill layers. The second icon is the layer mask for the adjustments; without selecting the layer itself (which was originally rotated) it would’ve filled the entire document with the adjustment. This is explained more in the TutorialKey Photoshop CS Training program. These are all custom adjustment/fill layers for this layer of the couple (from the ClubCast.tv portfolio).

Feel free to double click and change whatever settings you feel are necessary on the adjustment/fill layers. Here I’ve lowered the opacity on the original pattern fill layer.

I’ll be honest, the curves adjustment layer just turned out to work out real nice without even planning it. Note the extra ‘shape’ in a different shade of green; this is the curves adjustment layer. I probably would’ve added something else later to make it more interesting, but as a designer when you run across new ‘mistakes’ you should be able to tell instantly whether they ‘work’ or not and I knew right away this work out. It adds more to the ‘vector’ element of the design.

And here, you’ve made it through the complete tutorial. Hopefully this taught you more about mixing a lot of different Photoshop elements together. It probably also let you in on some inside secrets which most designers just don’t want to share. 

Let this ‘big picture’ concept of design start to sink in and note the balance of the bitmap and vector elements. Try creating your own version of this tutorial and have fun!  Don't forget you can browse the iPSDirectory and get this and hundreds of other hot complete designs (.psd's) for free with the PhotoshopDesigner Package!