Hi there, I’m Cory from WikkidThings.com, and today we’re going to learn how to design a club flyer. So, to get started, we’re going to kind of go over some basic printing specs tech stuff, this is kind of the boring part.

First of all we’re going to set up the flyer at 11 x 17, so it’s actually more like a club poster. Now, a couple of things to know, you want to make sure you’re set here for inches rather than pixels or you’re not going to be too happy when the design is done and it’s the size of an ant. So make sure you’re set for inches. Second, we want to go ahead and put some bleed on here, so we’re going to actually go ahead and add .125. So instead of 11 x 17, it’s 11.125 x 17.125. That’s basically adding a bleed on, so, when these are printed, you don’t have any texts or images that get cut off, because when it’s printed it will be cut down a little bit smaller and you don’t want that. So, you add .125, some printers take .25 but we do .125.

Now your resolution if this was for the web, you’d probably want to set that for 72 dpi, but for print, you want to go up to 300 dpi. Now in this case, 300 pixels per inch, same basic difference, so yes, anytime you’re doing web graphics, do 72 dpi or if you’re doing print graphics do 300 dpi, very important!

All right, color mode, again for web, you want to do RGB, for print you want to go CMYK. Now, I’m going to keep it on RGB and I’ll tell you why, because a lot of the filters in Photoshop only work in RGB mode. So, I’m going to do the entire design, going to add all the filters, do what we got to do, and then at the very end, I’m going to convert it over to CMYK, because that works better for me, damn it.

All right, so we got our document, you want to go ahead and hit Z, which brings up the zoom tool. Zoom in until you’ve got 16 little marks on your ruler, by the way if you don’t see your ruler, go ahead and click view, and scroll to rulers, make sure that’s checked off, if it’s not then check it now, because it’s pretty darn handy. Now you want to drag a guideline in 3/16 of an inch. Remember I told you about our bleed, this is actually what the bleed is, we’re going to bring that in 3/16 so, its 3 little marks out of 16 in an inch, get it, makes sense? Yes, all right! So, yes, so there’s that and then you bring the other one down 3/16 of an inch, and now you’re feeling pretty good. Now you’re going to drag this one all the way over to the other side, again 3/16 of an inch and scroll down to the bottom, and do the same God damn thing.

All right, so now we have our document, we have our guidelines, so what I want to do is actually go ahead and fill this in with black. If this is not set black and a white as it is right here, all you have to do is hit D on your keyboard, and it defaults it back to black and white. For example, let’s say you were going all crazy one day, and you had your color set to like red and blue like you were doing a all patriotic American design or some shit, I don’t know. So when you open your document, you say that “Red and blue, what the fuck?” So you just go ahead and hit D, defaults it back to black and white. And then everything’s closure, everything’s good in your universe. So, if you have black there, you’re going to go ahead and select your paint bucket tool, which is right here, and just fill that sucker in.