Tutorial: Turn standard fonts into something interesting - PS7
This tutorial is geared toward wallpapers and banners, but with some adjustment and a little fantasy, it might as well work for icons. The idea came to me when I was looking for fonts to use on my wallpapers. There are a couple of fonts that people use over and over again ( including me ) – because they’re popular, because they look good, because they just fit. But what about creating your own unique ‘font’ for your project? Why not take good old Times New Roman and turn it into something others will not have... because you made it!
You need:
- Adobe PS7
- knowledge to work with layers, blend modes, and most importantly, blending options
- Adobe PS7 default brushes or downloaded brushes
- Adobe PS7 default textures or downloaded textures
- an idea
An idea? Yup. An idea. See, before you go ahead and create good looking boring-fonts turned interesting-fonts, you need to know what you want to use them for. Here is where your brushes come in, as a matter of fact. Where do you want the font? On a dreamy, soft wallpaper? On a grungy, rough-looking one? On a plain one, with the font as the eye catcher? Select the brushes you want to use accordingly. I worked with Adobe PS7’s default brushes for this tutorial, but used one of my own textures.
I wanted something grungy and rough-looking because it was supposed to go on this:
It’s a texture I made a while ago and I decided to use it for a wallpaper. I’m going to use this texture for this tutorial – keep in mind, though, that any wallpaper/texture can work with this. Experiment and be creative!
I used Times New Roman, which should come with any computer that runs a Windows OS, but basically, any font works as long as you can work with it. Using swirly or decorative fonts is beside the point though. We’re trying to add something spiffy to a boring font, and not make an already spiffy font unreadable.
On a new layer, I typed ‘TIME’ in Times New Roman:
200px size
Tracking 100
Anti-aliasing: sharp
Colour: black
Here’s a screenshot of what my character palette looks like:
And a screenshot of what my image looks like:
Pretty boring so far. You’ll be working almost exclusively with the Blending Options from here on out, as well as the brushes, so let’s whip out the Blending Options palette and do the following:
1. Select your Text layer, because this is where you want the pattern to go.
2. On the Layer palette, find the little button with the ‘f’ in it for quick access to your different Blending Options, or double-click on the Text layer. Either one will open the Blending Options palette.
3. In the list, proceed to ‘Pattern Overlay’.
4. Select your pattern. I played around for a bit until I found one that I liked and ended up choosing one of my monochrome series because it was, well, black and white like the background. If you later want to play with the blending options of the layers themselves, selecting a pattern that bears some resemblance to your background can work wonders, but that’s just my opinion and what looks good is ultimately up to you.
Here’s what my image looks like now, including my Layer palette:
Now it’s time to Rasterize your Text layer so you can use brushes on it. Before you do this step, make sure you’re happy with the way the pattern looks and happy with what you’ve written. Though you can always go back in your history or take a snapshot, this is where the real ‘work’ begins, and going backward to undo a million things is tedious.
To rasterize your layer, go to Layer >> Rasterize >> Type, or right-click on the layer and select 'Rasterize'.
Done? Get out those brushes and go wild. I’m not going to describe each brush I used, only that I used pretty much all of Adobe’s default sets. Keep in mind that you need to apply your brushes on your former Text layer, ‘Time’ here in my example, otherwise the trick won’t work. After about five minutes of brushing around, I ended up with this:
Not too hot, but you can see how using brushes on a layer that has one or more (!) Blending Options applied will extend said Blending Options to the brushes, thus creating a seamless effect between your original text and what you put on it with brushes.
Let’s play around some more, again with the blending options:
- 1 pixel stroke in black applied to the layer
- 1px stroke black
- Bevel and Emboss: Inner Bevel, Technique–smooth, Depth–100%, Direction–Up, Size–5, Soften–0, Angle–30°, Altitude–30°, Global light checked
- Satin: Blend Mode ‘Multiply’, Opacity 50%, Angle 19°, Distance 11, Size 14, Invert
- Gradient Overlay: Rainbow gradient set to hard light
“I don’t know, doctor, she screamed something about Blending Options and then there was this explosion...”
“And then she did something crazy and deleted all the Blending options but ‘Bevel and Emboss’ and set them to this setting. Oh, she also set the Text layer to 'soft light'.”
“...and babbled something about infinite possibilities.”
Forgive the stupid story-esque commentary. Main message? Go wild. Explore. You have a ton of options at your fingertips, literally, only a few clicks of the mouse away.
Tutorial © Nin Noctuidae 2005
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