How To Make an Animated Banner For MySpace

Tools:

• A picture of speakers as a sample 
• Adobe Photoshop 

How You’ll Do It:
Step 1

Make a new document in Photoshop. Make your width 450, height 100, resolution 72, and color mode RGB Color.

Step 2

Double click the layer and name it BG. Give the background a color that’s going to stand out so go to the gradient overlay tool. Dark red for the bottom and bright red for the top is really catchy.

Step 3

Add some text, using fonts that stand out like ‘impact’. Make your text big enough to occupy a big space on your layer. Right click the layer and duplicate it, changing the text slightly from ‘Free Drums’ to ‘Free Samples’ to ‘Free Tutorials’ to ‘Free…’ and so on. You can make the last piece of text your group, company or label.

Step 4

Take the circle tool. Make a circle about 1/5 the size of the banner by holding shift and dragging your mouse. Double click the ‘res’ section and make it black. Move it to the side until it is clear of the text.

Step 5

Go back to your picture of the speakers. Crop out everything you don’t need. Deselect it, and once again use shift and the circle tool to make a perfect circle and drag it to where you want to cut it. Hit control and select the circle. Hide the circle and select the layer with the speaker image in it. Hit the mask tool to cut everything out. Drag what is produced to the banner. Use shift and the transform tool to scale the speaker to an ideal height. Scale everything properly.

Step 6

Rename the layers as to avoid confusion. Duplicate the speaker and rename it ’speaker big’ or something. Hide ’speaker big’ and work on the speaker below it. Transform it a bit and make it smaller. You now have two layers of speakers.

Step 7

For ’speaker big’ you can apply a few blurs in the Filter section. Motion blur is excellent. Set it to about 15 for a great effect.

Step 8

Go back to your ‘Free Drums’. Bring out the animation tool. For the first frame, use a blur. Duplicate the free drums layer. Put the speaker on blur and go to motion blur again, make it about 30. Your first layer should be about .2 secs, make another layer and set it to about 2 secs. Hide your ‘free drums motion blur’ layer and put up ‘free drums’ and also hide he ’speaker big’.

Step 9

Make another frame. Put the ’speaker big’ on again. Hide free drums and make a copy of free samples. Go to motion blur once again. Repeat the process done in number 8 for free drums for all.

Step 10

Save it as a GIF and to wherever you want. And there you have your banner!