The Graceful Art of Photoshop

I had some rage yesterday. It was compounded by annoyance over something else with my advertising peoples. Occasionally, to sweeten the pot of an advertising buy, we do something on Classic-Horror.com called a co-branded nav bar. The company buying the adspace sends me a whole bunch of key art for the film and I design, in Photoshop, a graphic meant to fit on the right-hand side of the site's header, advertising the release of the film.

I've done some pretty good ones in the past (I'm particularly fond of the one I did for The Fog remake, where I shrouded the entire header in, yes, fog), but generally, they're a pain in the ass. I've told my ad brokers that I reserve the right to approve a co-brand in a campaign before they pitch it. However, for an upcoming direct-to-DVD release, they included me without my consent, but I honestly didn't mind because the client was doing the design themselves. I just had to send them the specs and pre-existing graphics for my header and everything would be peachy.

I wish.

Last night around 8PM, I received a call from the ad company, apologizing, but they've just now received the art and they've sent it to me and by the way, it's supposed to run starting tomorrow. Not a problem, I said. Unless there's a major problem, I would have it up by midnight. Opened my email, checked the graphic, and it was very well-done. Very professional.

It also rendered my navigation menu utterly useless.

A bit of history: the navigation bar used to be under the header graphic, but with the new design I shifted it to sit in the header on the right-hand side. I noted this in my email regarding specifications. The design I was sent was apparently based on my old set-up, however. I made a quick mock-up and sure enough, the navigation sat right on top of the co-brand and they both rendered each other unreadable and ugly. I sent a screenshot to my ad reps. They asked me if I could futz with it to make it work.

Luckily, the client had sent their art in PSD format. My job, basically, was to create a new graphic that incorporated the one sent to me while still leaving space for my navigation bar. Since I couldn't increase the size of my header without distorting the background graphics, I had to reduce the co-brand in such a way that the vital information was still readable. What I ended up doing was shifting all the elements upward, shrinking them as little as possible and using the fact that most of the graphics had been centered with extra headroom to my advantage. Then, I created a section for the menu below the reduced graphic. This area used the same background so it fit with the co-brand, but subtly bathed in red to visually recall the navigation menu's usual surroundings.

The result is up here: http://classic-horror.com/

I had to shrink the witch and the DVD box the most and they suffer some for it. I also had to reduce the size of the "Own the UNRATED DVD" graphic minimally. Thankfully, I didn't have to change the size of the film's title at all. The whole thing, except for the tracking pixel, was then inserted onto the site using pure CSS.

I'm not completely pleased. I would've like a little more breathing room for the menu to make it more distinct from the co-brand, but my header isn't very tall, unfortunately. Still, an admirable job that only took me four hours.

In other news, there has never been a more perfect match between film reviewer and reviewed film than midnightfae and Black Sheep.