Not me recreating from scratch a mock up of a freebie branded pen for my portfolio because readymade aren't available. Couldn't be wouldn't be me. Nope. Except it totally is. This was branded for the vaccine study to give to patients in their study packets, and colleagues at conventions.
Here's a nice detail.
Project startup began in 2011. In 9 months we were ready to recruit in 2012. The project concluded in 2018. In April 2018 it was touched upon a CDC's Grand Rounds on Hepatitis C prevention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQfjsUKYLh0&t=2345s
All to say my pen, from 2011, has seen some action and isn't the shining example it once was. For a long while it was standard issue for my stick-n-poke tattoo kit since I only used it to draw on the initial design before poke poke poke. Stellar universal bloodbourne practices at every step ensured safety and made onward transmission of any disease next to zero. These practices were vindicated by zero transmission amongst the tattooed.
Back to the pen in my hand from today. To make it presentation quality required some photoshop magic. The little details matter!
It all started with sourcing the same pen design from thirteen years ago. Still available here! Side note- mine still works! Keep that in mind for your next branding adventure.
2. Screen capped it with Greenshot! free and open source screen capture: https://getgreenshot.org/ (It is the best screenshoter out there! Used it for 12 years and it's never let me down! Plus you can adjust to high quality PNG outputs.
The screenshot I used isolated the pen itself outputting the image at 613x616 (Eyeballed the screenshot bounding box).
3. Saved as PNG for lossless upscaling.
4. Upscale with Upscayl AI. https://www.upscayl.org/#desktop Opting to upscale 2x using the General Photo (Ultrasharp) model for this use case.
5. Then it's off to Photoshop to buff out the stock logo using the clone stamp and spot heal brushes.
6. Matched the font to the hobsons choice granted by the branded merch service limited us to (It's Verdana)
7. Set output as PNG here too.
This is far as I got before thinking- huh- this is great fodder for a blog describing my process. It's not enough to say I did this. It must be proven for all the world's a show! And the show must go on.
8. Gaussian Blur at 0.5 pixels to remove magic select artifacts leftover from the background and soften those edges.
9. Warp Text> Inflate +4 Bend to give it an ounce of
10. A little adjustment here and there with the free transform tool on the logo. Not much. A little pinching in with the ctrl and select corners to scrunch inward to simulate curling around a cylinder. Feels like I nailed it, when considering artistic license for this assets ultimate destination: A large spread of portfolio assets. I chose not to represent it 1:1.
Sometimes design is about elevating the details critical to the success of its use case. This means representation depiction isn't always the best way to
What do you think? Presentation ready?
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