Different Ways to Make a New Skin With CS5
Just as you decorate your home to express your interests and personality, you can customize your MP3 player, cell phone, tablet and other electronic devices with skins. These overlays fit around the controls on your favorite gadget to apply graphics and emblems, from NFL or MLB team logos to images from video games, movies and musical groups. For a truly individualized look, you can create your own skins in Adobe Creative Suite 5 applications.
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Before You Start
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To make sure your skins will fit your devices and create the impression you want to present, use templates designed specifically for the make and model of each device you want to skin, as well as the software in which you're working. If you're going to print your own skins, verify that your output device can handle the special material used for these types of projects. If you're using a commercial service for output, check its specifications carefully to assure good results. As you design, maximize the capabilities of your software in the way you approach your work.
Adobe Photoshop
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Whether you want to skin your cell phone with an expressive montage of family pictures or turn a photo of a beautiful landscape into an eye-catching wrap for your tablet, Adobe Photoshop provides the bitmap-oriented tools to support your efforts. Use the Crop tool to isolate the most important part of an image. A Levels or Curves adjustment layer can help you tame color casts that make scenes captured under incandescent or fluorescent light look yellow or green. If you isolate parts of several images with the Lasso tool and composite them together, you can use layer styles to add a drop shadow or a beveled edge to the layers that contain individual composition elements.
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Adobe Illustrator
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If you want to draw an illustration with sharply detailed pen strokes or combine type and shapes in a drawing, reach for Adobe Illustrator. You can draw a clever set of vector graphics for your devices using Adobe Illustrator's Pen tool, and use live effects to add shadows and glows to your designs. For an interesting abstract design, build geometrics using reflected and rotated copies of simple shapes. You can add an all-over background with a solid color or gradient to turn the case of your phone or MP3 player a different shade. You even can build pictures using the letters, numbers and punctuation from a typeface as shapes, instead of text.
Adobe InDesign
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In Adobe InDesign, you can lay out designs for skins that combine text, graphics and geometric designs, and incorporate the elements you create in Photoshop and Illustrator into your work. Experiment with color as you position your design elements, and embellish them with lines and shapes you draw in your layout. You can create object and paragraph styles to transform frames and type with single-click precision. For convenience, build each skin on an individual document page so you can review alternate versions of the same design idea or make a coordinated set of skins for everyone in the family.
Image Ideas
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You can capture images for your skins with the cameras built into the devices you're customizing. If you use a cell phone plan that supplies handsets for your whole family, you can build a set of skins that includes images of each family member. To avoid embarrassing anyone, remember to save the baby pictures for the private family album. Before you print designs that you're creating for other family members, save your work as Acrobat PDF files so you can email them an advance look at your creations for review and comment.
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References
Resources
- The Photoshop CS3/CS4 WOW! Book; Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie
- The Adobe Illustrator CS5 Wow! Book; Sharon Steuer
- Real World InDesign CS5; Olav Martin Kvern et al.
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Goodshoot/Getty Images
