Drawing relationships for your characters - Photoshop Tutorial

In this video series, we are recreating a radial chart to visualize relationships between a bunch of different characters. Our circle-relationship infographic has twenty-four different entities--and I will call them characters-- and three different groups: venture capitalists, angels and founders, and the social networking startups they invested in. In this lesson, we're going to draw the labels for these characters, so that we can then position them to create a beautiful and useful diagram. We're going to start with the wireframe we left off with in the last video and first create big category labels and then smaller character labels. As you can see here in this exercise file, you can toggle the wireframe on and off and you can toggle on that completed infographic for reference if you want, and even layer them over each other. Since the social networks are the object of the relationships in this diagram-- investors and angels are investing money into the social networks-- it makes sense to put the social networks at the bottom and then have the money, so to speak, flow down to them. Now let's switch back to our wireframe and go to Excel to count how many characters we have in each category so can see how big we need to make the labels. Here in Excel, we're going to count how many angels and how many venture capitalists we have, so we can know how many we have to squish in each corner. You can see here we have one, two, three, four, five, six angel investors and seven venture capitalists. So now we'll go back into Photoshop and create big labels for each of those categories. Here in Photoshop I am going to create a label for the angels, the venture capitalists, and the social networks. Using the Text tool here on the left toolbar, I am going to go and I am going to set the font size to 24 pt. with the Myriad Pro, and we will use semibold. By clicking on the canvas, I can start the text. It's a little bit smaller right now, so I am going to hit Command+Plus to zoom in a little bit. Here is the Angels and Founders label. I am going to put it up here in the top corner so we can have the smaller labels go beneath it. To make the next label, I am just going to copy this layer by holding in the Alt or Option key until I get these two arrows here and then clicking and dragging to copy it so I have the exact same font for the next label. Now I will use the Text tool by hitting T or by clicking on the icon, and I will click here, delete it, and change this to Venture Capitalists. I will click the Move tool to exit out of that. I'll do a copy one more time, and scroll down to put a label for the social networks. On the original infographic, I drew some little icons for each of the labels, but that's just a little bit of extra detail that you can reproduce on your own if you like. Back in Excel, let's now grab the first character so we can make a small label to go under Angels. Josh Schachter. I am going to copy his cell so I have the text of his name and now I am back in Photoshop, I am going to zoom out and move to put a label for him over here, under Angels, where he belongs. To make this label I am going to create a background really quick, using the Shape tool, which is the U key for shortcut, and I am going to have the background to be black. I am going to draw a little rectangle and then zoom in so we can type inside of it. I am going to use the font Myriad Pro, Regular, and the 13 pt, which I can just type in here and hit Enter. Now if I mouse over right here, it's going to try and put it into that box and put it on the edges. So instead first, I am going to create a new layer on top of the label that I created, and now I am going to type here. And I am going to paste in Josh's name, which you'll notice is black. So I will select his name and change it to white. Now we have Josh Schachter here. I am going to move him over and then click on the box to adjust the size so that it has just a little bit of padding around him. This is the label we'll use as the template for the rest of our labels. So once I have him how I wanted, I'll select both of those labels and click the Link button here, so now anytime I click on one of them, I can move any of them anywhere. So I am going to copy this over to Venture Capitalists, and we will put our first VC down. Digital Sky Technologies. So I will copy this name and go back to Photoshop. I am going to edit this text, and here Digital Sky extends off of the black box, so I'm going to adjust the size of the black box by clicking on it. And it has to be unlinked from the text in order to work. So if it's then linked, you can click on the Link icon here to unlink it. Since it's a copy, it's not linked to anything yet, so I can simply click and drag the edge and hit Enter when I am done. And I can move this around until it looks right. So now you can go in and fill in the rest of the characters. I am just going to go ahead and add the rest of labels right now. And I will zoom out so you can see all of them. Now that we've got labels for all of our characters, we are ready to start arranging them in the next video so they fit around the circle and so that they can actually point to the lines that they are labeling.