WEBEXPEDITION18 Never Stop The Exploring

Retro is a culturally outdated or aged style, trend, mode, or fashion, from the overall postmodern past, but have since that time become functionally or superficially the norm once again.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create cool minimalistic retro wallpaper in Photoshop in few simple steps.
The design we will be building is made up of basic circle shapes, mixed with paper texture, spiced with minimal typography and aged with few scratches.

Preview

Take a look at final design that we will be creating.

Resources

- Paper Texture
- Heavy Scratch Brush
- Helvetica

Idea behind the design

The idea for a simple wallpaper was in my head for a long time. I wanted to create dark wallpaper, very minimalistic, a kind of retro poster. So I sketched few ideas on the paper.

Step 1

Open up Photoshop and create new document. I will be using a size of 1920x1200px to target almost all modern monitors resolutions. Fill the background with dark gray color #040707.

Pick up Ellipse Tool (U) and draw a circle. To get a perfect circle hold Command + Shift while drawing. Position the circle like shown on the picture and fill it with nice orange color #e66705.

Since we’re going to need five more circles, and these are all the same size, I suggest you, to duplicate that first circle layer (Command + J) five more times. Position circles like on the picture below.

Now change the colors of each circle. I used following colors (from left to right starting with the one next to first cirlce we create):

- green #22511c
- yellow #f0e204
- blue #04386c
- light gray #efece8
- red #8d0107

Here’s what we have at the moment.

Step 2

Let’s add some typography. I decided to type 1972, which is actually the year I was born, using font Helvetica, sized at 120px, bold, color set to white. To make it a bit different and less boring, I selected “72″, with Type Tool (T), and changed the style to Bold Oblique.

Step 3

Now open Paper Texture you have already downloded in Photoshop, copy and paste it into wallpaper at the top. Since is pretty hughe, resize the texture (Command + T) so it fits around the wallpaper.
Go to Image -> Adjusments -> Black&White and just hit OK to use Default Preset.

Change the blend mode to Multiply and lower the opacity to 30%. We already have nice paper textured wallpaper.

Step 4

In this step we will add crease to wallpaper. Here’s a neat tip how to create crease without using any textures.
Create a new layer at the top. With Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) make a slection.

Reset foreground and background colors to black and white by pressing D on the keyboard. Pick up Gradient Tool (G), choose Black to Transparent, and make a small gradient, so the darkest part coming from the bottom of the selection. Lower the opacity to 40%.

Create a new layer above black gradient. Inverse the selection by pressing Command + Shift + I.

Switch foreground and background colors by pressing X. Once again pick up Gradient Tool (G), this time choose White to Transparent, and create a small gradient, so the brightest part is coming from the top of the selection.

Lower the opacity to 20%.

Select both layers and merged them into one layer (Command + E). Add Layer Mask, make sure that foreground color is black, pick up Brush Tool (B), choose Hard Round brush, set Hardness to 0%, Master Diameter to 30px and Opacity to 36% and start brushing away crease on the left side.
We want to focus crease that is over the circles. Continue masking the crease until you achieve something like this.

Step 5

Create new layer at the top. Set white for the foreground color. Invoke Brush Tool (B), choose Heavy Scratch brush.

Paint just once with the brush.

Change the Blend Mode to Soft Light and Opacity to 20% to make it more subtle. That’s about it folks. Here’s our final design.

I hope you enjoy, and I invite you to share your thoughts about this tutorial by leaving a comment.

Bonus: Download Wallpaper

available resolutions: 1920×1200, 1920×1080

iPhone version: 320×480

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Authored by Nikola Lazarevic

Web Designer, Blogger, M.Sc in Electronic Engineering from Nis, Serbia. Founder of webexpedition18.com. You can find me on Twitter.