You know those times when you’re talking on the phone and just zone out, not realizing you’ve just doodled your name (or some unidentifiable scribbles) on the envelope in front of you until the call is done? Every time my brother does that, I take another pen and write “sucks” after each signature. Why yes, I am the best sister ever.
I’m going to walk you through how to do some name-doodling on Photoshop. You know, because we’re in a technological era and we don’t use pens anymore. Ever. I kind of lied in my title though; a wordmark is more like the prettified text of a logo, like the one FedEx uses. Sponsor! (I wish).
As you can probably see by glancing at my previous blog entries, Mine isn’t going to look as simple and clean-cut as this. Come on, I need to have some consistency here with these scribbles that I put on display. If you want to create a logo like the above however, you could use Photoshop, but I’d recommend Adobe Illustrator for a lot of graphic work. I’ll briefly describe the main difference between Photoshop and Illustrator:
- Photoshop is bitmap based (also called raster-based or pixel-based), meaning an image in the program is made up of pixels. If you stretch the image a great deal, it will appear fragmented and pixelly. For the digital paintings that I abuse the brush tool to make, Photoshop is the perfect medium. No bias here, keep on moving. Shhh.
- Illustrator is vector based. Vector images can be scaled or transformed to any size and will remain nice and smooth. Most logos and graphics that need to be printed in various sizes will be vector-based.
Note: Text created using the text tool in Photoshop is vector-based.
That’s it for our daily dose of details that you may or may not care about. Moving on!
1. Search for a Font You Like
Using: the type tool
To kick off your wonderful doodling spree, you can start with going on a wild treasure-seeking adventure. For fonts.
Familiarize yourself with Dafont.com, which is the best thing ever for finding fonts that people make and upload for public use. Watch out for the copyright notices though; some are free, some are free for personal use, some are donationware, etc., though for this little sketching exercise we won’t have to worry about that. Just a heads up for if you want to make some kickass posters or something.
I installed the font Space Frigate, which makes my username look more awesome than it sounds. All you need so far is to use the type tool (T) and select your font. You can also change the font and size of certain parts of the text by highlighting the letters you want to change with the type tool.
2. Kerning and… Oh God What is All of This
Using: the type tool
Using this menu, you can adjust things like how close together the letters are in your text, use subscript and superscript, change how vertically and horizontally stretched the type is, and change the font, font colour and size. Experiment with these until you find the balance you like, and the icons to the left of each option are pretty good at describing what they’re designed to do. Or, you know, you could not touch any of this at all. That works too.
3. Fancy Waves and Stuff
Using: the type tool and warp text tool
I chose an intricate title for this step, I know. If you highlight your text and click the icon at the top toolbar with the T sitting atop an arch (circled in red below) you can distort the text to reflect your diabolical, twisted personality. Muahahaha.
4. Rasterizing and Fancifying
Using: the marquee tool, move tool, brush tool
Once you’re happy with the font, size, shape and anything else about the text that we’ve gone over so far, we can edit it further, without using the type tool.
To make the text editable, we need to rasterize it by right-clicking the layer the text is on and selecting rasterize type. Now your text that was once in vector form is now pixel based. You can select parts of it with the marquee tool (M), and move or transform them with the move tool (V). Since the type is now pixel-based however, be careful not to stretch any part of your text too much or it will become blurry and pixellated.
I used the selection/marquee and move tools to move the capital L, cut and drag the end of it to the far right, and paint in the rest of the L with the brush tool.
5. Doodling ’til Your Hand Bleeds
Using: the brush tool, lasso tool, layer styles
This is really where the “doodling your name” part comes in. Using the brush tool with your newly-rasterized type, you can paint away as many details as you want. The fun part of this is that you may or may not have a plan in mind, and it doesn’t matter. Add some dragons, tiny-armed T-Rexes, butterflies and Chewbaccas alongside your name if you want. Doodle a random, scribbly masterpiece for me.
This can easily be the final product of your doodling session. Or, we can add some more effects. Here are two useful techniques to add some effects to your wordmark/doodle:
- Gradients. In this blog entry, I went over colouring an image using a separate layer with the layer style multiply. A similar technique that can be used for hard-edged shapes like above is to select the layer with the text and doodles on it (make sure it’s all in one layer by highlighting them, right-clicking and selecting merge layers) and locking the transparency by clicking the checkered box (shown below) on the far left.
With the transparency locked, you can add gradients (G), and paint over the locked layer without having to worry about “going outside the edges”.
- Layer styles. Go to the layer that your design is on and select blending options. You should now be overwhelmed with a whole assortment of choices to change, enhance and edit your text. Depending on your design, I suggest using stroke, bevel and emboss, drop shadow and texture. These will serve as useful effects for your future Photoshop adventures too. Try them out and see if they go with your design!
Your design layer doesn’t need to be transparency-locked to apply layer styles, because they’re layer-specific anyway.
Congratulations, you’ve leveled up, and learned a set of potentially useful skills that you can apply to your works in a million ways. And when you become a Pokémon Photoshop master (if you aren’t already, of course) you can look back at these entries and teach me a few things. Yes, please do.