Touchdown!

Pearson Education enlisted my services again for another one of their author’s book sites with Dr. Kevin Elko’s new book, Touchdown!, released on July 20th. I once again used the theme that they like for book sites and confirmed with the author’s agent this week as I started putting up his content.

I wanted to go with a football motif (obviously), so I opted for a custom grassy background. I had a hard time deciding between a ground-level perspective with the grass poking up and half-covering the book cover or a football or an aerial perspective. Based on my experience with background/header incorporation into this theme, I chose an aerial perspective to enable me to use a repeating background and a transparent PNG for the header overlay that includes the book, title, and the goal post shadow (so I enabled the PNG fix plugin for WordPress).

Using Filter Forge for Mac, I created a seamless tiled grass image, faded it to black (well, to dirt to black in the first iteration), and then used a feathered area selector to paint on the chalk line of the endzone. For the finishing touch, putting the shadow on top was just a matter of pasting a goal post shadow at 60% opacity .