THREE WAY | DESIGNING WITH OVERLAYS

Hello Friends! I am excited to kick off another year of our Three Way series with a clean, simple design trick : overlays! But since this is a Three Way post, we are not simply going to grab a bit of Word Art or a little border and plop it down over our photo. Let's jazz it up a bit and really create a bold statement, making our photo and the overall design shine on our pages!

Here's a peek at what I am going to be showing you in today's post.

Each one of these overlay ideas has a little something in common (except the fact that there is typography of course). That little something is a punch of color! Are you excited to try these design tricks? I hope so. The best part about these color overlay tricks is how simple they are. Let's get going:

For the first example, I took a black and white photo and added a rectangle block of color inside the photo area (I like this design better than the circle for my rectangular photo), but you can do this with any shape you'd like. I reduced the opacity to about 80%. I added a fun stroked border ... again a dotted or dashed line would be fun too. Get creative! And then I added my word art title using the Lobster font, a little dotted line and some extra text as a subtitle in Courier New Regular font.

Here's my page:

Now let's play with a gradient color overlay. This is another fun way to add a pop of unexpected color to a black and white image. I just made a box and filled it with a gradient that went from solid color to transparency and positioned it over the top 2/3s of my photo. I added a clean white frame and the same word art and dotted line as in the first example.

Here's my page:

And our third overlay design trick is probably my fave out of the three. It's a block of color but in a contrasting orientation than my photo shape. I reduced the opacity to about 75%. It covers part of the photo and gives us a place to add some text and design elements. Here's a tip though ... to really pull off this look you need to add some noise or grain to your block of color. If you have Photoshop simply use the Filter < Noise < add Noise feature (I went for a 10% value on my block of color). I added the noise to my black and white photo too! And I even went back to my second page (above) and added a bit of noise to the gradient color overlay because I really liked the look. In the first example, I left the rectangle clean with no noise.

Here's my page:

That's it for this Three Way series round up. I hope you are inspired to add a punch of color to your next photo!