Pimping your iPhone skin submissions.

Here is a quick tip for those of you, who submit their designs and artwork to websites like threadless.com and infectious.com to enter the contest where the winner gets some extra dough or gets his/hers designs printed on t-shirts, decals, laptops and mobile phone skins.

This is also a great way of, hopefully, getting a slight advantage over designs that are just loaded up as plain square images where there might be some flaws in the artwork in the areas that won’t show anyway when printed yet will affect the score and feedback you get from your submission.

And while I am still waiting for my iPhone to arrive and this it the only thing I can think about now, I will concentrate on the iPhone but this applies just as well to any other rubbish phones out there… just kidding:)
I will probably loose it because of this joke. Instant Karma is not sleeping, trust me.

Ok, let us start.

As an example, I will use Infectious.com submission system and its requirements (Image size: exactly 650px wide and up to 800px high, file size – max 250kb):

Tools required:

1) Internet connection.

2) Photoshop or similar application where you can use selection tools and layers.

3) Your favorite design.

Actions:

• Start Photoshop
• Create a new file with the dimensions that’s exactly 650px wide and up to 800px high (requirements for Infectious.com submissions)

• Go to skinnit.com

NOTE read this bit only if you really don’t know how to handle online customizers

• Click: CHOOSE THE DEVICE button
• Click APPLE – or click PHONES to choose whichever other phone you are currently stuck with:)

• If you’ve gone with apple –  pick your device (this division is something I don’t quite understand as I don’t think there’s any difference in skin dimensions between the two.)

• Choose: BROWSE DESIGNS* or CREATE YOUR OWN

(*Use this only in case you’ve changed your mind about entering the competition and just want to use one of their lovely designs in which case thanks for reading this and have a good day)

• Here we go – Up loads a beautiful flash based skinnit customizer that allows you to load your own design, set background color, insert text, shapes -  everything.

• Upload your design to both sides of the device’s skin and adjust the position.
• Click PREVIEW button above your design

• Tap Print Screen/SysRq button on your keyboard or use any other way screen capture software available ( I recommend in-built GRAB for Mac users).
• Go back to your 650X800px file in Photoshop and use CTR+Alt to paste the image on.

• Position the image in the centre of the canvas (use guides if necessary)
• Pick “Magic Wand Tool”(W) from the Tools pallete (Window>Tools)
• Click on white area anywhere in the image to select the white colour surrounding the previewed devices.
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+I (PC) or CMD+SHIFT+I (Mac) or go to SELECT>INVERSE to select the devices.
• CTRL+J /(CMD+J) to copy the selection into a new layer.

• Delete the layer below this new layer.

There! You now have your pretty design placed on a transparent layer over a background layer that you can then customize with extra graphics, your original image and more to make it more appealing so people will vote, so you can make money to become rich, so people will like you even more and vote even more so you can buy yoursels more gadgets you don’t really need, like the iPhone, for example;)

Ah, Almost forgot – If you find my advise useful. Please, gimme some love by logging in to Infectious.com voting on my submitted designs here for the gangsta twitt iphone skin and here for the vector cat twitter macabre iphone skin . I want to buy gadgets too!:)

If you do do that – you’ll see the plain versions of the designs. Well, yeah – this knowledge that I am currently sharing came to me after I submitted mine and -

What a nasty surprise – once you upload your image – no editing. So make sure you get it right with yours:)

Thank you for reading.