A recent promo-image, which I designed (edited) using Photoshop (a photo-editing tool), created some interest among the people who saw the promotion and I decided to share the creative process with you:

The Request
The design request (by a greatly valued client of mine: Road Holland) was to create a home page promotional image to advertise a holiday season sale. 

The Idea
The idea was to create a winter theme, appropriate for the holiday season, using Road Holland’s iconic “Style Support Vehicle” (the van in the picture above) as a main character. 

Well known, snow is one of the most appropriate attributes for building the holiday spirit and the winter theme. It was evident from the very beginning that the van was to be placed in a winter, snowy environment, possibly parked by the road in the mountains. 

The Challenge
Living in South Florida, we rarely have cold days and close to never we have seen snow..... and we don’t even have mountains around here. 

Due to time constrains, resource limitations, but most importantly, due to the current Photoshop capabilities, we were to create the winter setting digitally. 

The Resource
We had an existing image of the van, taken (I’m assuming) during the summer. This is what we had only to work with:

The Creative Process  

1. Conceptualizing and visualizing the theme
Coming up with the concept, could be one of the most time-consuming phase during the creative process. Building the right concept or idea, usually involves multiple hours of research in order to determine which attributes would work well (backgrounds, foregrounds, detailing elements), as well as taking into a consideration the use of the appropriate properties of the image, such as proper shadows, lighting, saturation, depth, size relativeness of the objects, overall look and feel...etc. All this plays a fundamental role, not only for the overall impact of the image as an advertising tool, but also for the realistic outcome of the digital re-creation. 

2. Finding appropriate materials
Once I had the idea in mind and after a few hours of looking for the appropriate materials, I found and purchased the following images that I ended-up using as a foreground and a background accordingly:

Although the idea was to create a wither theme, I wanted to make sure that I kept away from the grey, dark winter feeling, and rather create a nice, bright and sunny day in snowy mountains. 

3. The Implementation

The base-point:

I. First I started by removing the unnecessary information from the image - the sunny, green, summery feeling and prepared the image for integration with the foreground and the background images. This was the most time-consuming step of the execution phase:

II. Then I added the foreground image. As mentioned above, the idea was to place the van in a setting as it was parked by the road:

III. After that I added the background image - the sunny and bright day in the mountain. At this point, I had to resize the foreground, the van and the background images accordingly for an appropriate relative relationship:

IV. The lightning needed to be corrected to accommodate for the sunny and bright day:

V. Last, but definitely not least, I added a few final details (snow on the door and the roof, icicles on the tube):

It is my believe that what differentiates a great design from a good design are “these final 10%” - the details: “the cherry on top” or “the icing on the cake”.  

VI. At the end I added the promo-relevant text and placed a little snow effect on the CTA (Call to Action) button:

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the article. Please feel free to provide your comments, recommendations or opinion.