Tutorial: Cut out a simple background in Photoshop
Photoshop: Remove an image background.
A commonly asked question in my design classes and one which absorbs too much of students time (welcome to the world of design) is how to remove the background from an image. To share one method of doing this, and to save me repeating the same live tutorial many times, here is my favourite method of removing the background from a simple image.
Image: Photodisc
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Road signs and an ageing population
A quarter of our population will be over 65 by 2026* and we are living longer, most of us will want to continue driving. Are our road signs designed to cope?
Research from the US has shown that their signs caused problems for older drivers and recommendations were made to produce much larger signs...
“The size of characters on all signs must be increased by at least 30%, which means 1 inch of character height to 38 feet of sight distance, versus the MUTCD standard of 1 inch for 50 feet. This would accommodate motorists testing 20/30 on the standard eye chart…” (Greene, et al 1996)
Thankfully, designers took an interest in the problem and rather than produce much larger signs they devised a more efficient typeface (font) to counter the effects of modern roads and an ageing population.
You can read more about the effects of halationhere.
*Central Statistics Office, CSO, Ageing in Ireland, 2007
Road users find new design clearer than old
In tests, a majority of English speaking road users chose colour-differentiated languages in the test typeface design over Ireland’s existing signs, and over UK-style signs as used in Wales.
The new proposal with the Turas test typeface (font), shown left, is designed to preserve the shape of words, an important factor in word recognition at speed, and to resist the negative effects on signs caused by modern headlights. Each letter shape has been optimised for this purpose.
Research findings - with Irish language speakers
Above: Slides from the screen-based test asking users to choose the clearer sign of two on each slide. Designs that were tested included the colour differentiated design using Turas my experimental road sign typeface, Clearview Hwy the new US design, the undifferentiated sign design used in Wales and the current Irish sign design, which uses uppercase English words beneath an inclined ‘italic’ Irish language typeface.
Comparative testing of designs for clarity
Having researched the issues and developed an initial prototype design solution I constructed a simple test showing comparative examples of existing versus alternative signage solutions. This article deals with the results of the Irish language speaking test group.
Read More...Creating and testing design variants
Finding a research-led design solution for Ireland’s dual-language road signs - a brief design journey.
World Tour
I first created many sketch sign layouts using commonly used typefaces which fitted the criteria of high x-height and suitability for signs. These rough tests were created to explore colour differentiation and compare this with other ways of differentiating the languages including weight difference, uppercase and italics.
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