Yawn.

Less yawn.

Even less yawn, for print at least.

Rant time. I am so sick of seeing default Photoshop layer effects all over the damn place. Lazy graphic designers who just click ‘drop shadow’ to ‘get some depth’ into their tedious flat designs and leave it at the default settings, they really should be drummed out of the club and forced to clean up bad scans for the rest of their lives.

I admit that adding a drop shadow can be helpful, especially when your source assets are a bit flat and dull, but when you resort to it in a print design, it invariably cheapens the result. Look at any high quality printed work, and you won’t see any drop shadows. You just won’t. You’ll see some airbrushing here and there, you’ll see a glow sometimes, you might see shadows in an illustration, but not a drop shadow. Use a damn outline, or just use a different colour for your ‘foreground’ element!

On screen, drop shadows often work because you’re representing things that are non-physical and apparently on a flat surface. There are no varnishes, no satin finishes, no luminous inks, nothing, so the temptation to include them is strong because the design always looks flat on a monitor: but a drop shadow is like seasoning, use sparingly!

If you are going to use a shadow, you should always change the settings from the default. I’m a strong believer in setting the global light in Photoshop to 90° so the light appears to be coming from above, and setting the blur to a higher value than the distance so the light is quite diffuse and apparently somewhere just above your head as you sit facing the monitor. Screen designs suit a centred light source as whatever the lighting conditions in the room, you will be viewing the screen contents in the context of a monitor which has very even illumination. You can imagine that the light is coming from behind or within the monitor (which is factually true), or, as I often do for the purpose of my designs, from an even light source behind the viewer which the screen is reflecting. The first idea lends itself to a design with glows and sharp outlines on dark backgrounds, the latter to one with light backgrounds, shadows and specular effects (used even more sparingly).