In our last post, we provided an overview of the basic steps needed to design a custom drum head. Those steps included adding text, shapes, and artwork to your design, as well as configuring portholes and other design elements unique to drum heads. All of these steps were done using our free online designer app here at Vintage Logos.

Today we will look at the more advanced features of the designer app, as well as provide you with some design tips. This will help ensure that the design of your custom drum head looks just the way you want it: absolutely stunning!

The Vintage Logos Designer App: Advanced Features & Design Tips

To begin, go ahead and launch the designer app as before. You’ll initially have to select the desired drum head size and brand. Then, if you have a saved design that you’d like to improve or finish, you can open that. Otherwise, create a new design!

Show/Hide the Grid

When designing, symmetry is very important — you want everything to look balanced and even. An easy way to achieve that is to line up everything to a grid. This feature can be easily enabled by clicking the “SHOW GRID” button at the bottom of the designer app. Once clicked, a grid will appear over the drum head. Keep in mind that each square in the grid represents 2 square inches in real life.

If at any point you’d like to turn off the grid again, simply click “HIDE GRID.”

Align Your Graphics and Text

In a similar way as the grid above, aligning allows your design to look as balanced and symmetrical as possible. Maybe you want to move all of the elements in your design into the very center or perhaps you want to align your text to one side or another. Whatever the case, here’s how you can do that:

Take a look at the left side of the designer app. Each element you add to your design (text, shapes, clip art, etc) is organized in a menu there. When you click on a specific element in that menu (or even the element in the design itself) you’re given a sub-menu of various editing options. One of those options is “align.” When you click on that, you’re given a menu with various alignment options, including a link to “align all items at one time.” Simply click the desired option and go from there!

Move Layers Up or Down

When adding and manipulating elements in your design, you may find that you need multiple elements stacked on top of each other. For example, you may have a piece of text that you’d like in front of a background image. This can be achieved by using the Layer Up and Layer Down feature.

This feature is available in the same sub-menu as the alignment option above. Once you’ve selected an element of your design, simply click the buttons “to front” or “to back” in the available sub-menu. This causes the element to move towards the foreground or background in the design. In addition, the element is reordered in its position in the menu on the left side of the app.

Design Effects

Most of the elements in your design have effects that you can add to them as well. These can be accessed via the sub-menu for each design element on the left side of the app. Here’s an overview of the effects you can choose from:

• Distort causes the element to bend or stretch from its original shape
• Outline (available for text and shapes only) adds a stroke outlining each letter of the text or a stroke outlining the entire shape
• Rotate
• Blur + and Blur – cause the element to appear more or less blurry and out of focus
• Opacity + and Opacity – cause the element to be more or less transparent, allowing visibility of the element(s) and background underneath
• Shadow adds a drop shadow to the element
• Flip and Mirror

Need More Info?

If you’d like to continue reading about how to design your custom drum head, including best practices for professional design results, we recommend our Design Tips & Issues page. This covers such issues as bleed margin, color differences between computer screens and printed products, and much more.