Vibrant Pop Text Effect « Photoshop Tutorials Blog

May 21 09

BY : psdlover

IN : Text Effects

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Vibrant Pop Text Effect

What We’re Making
This Text Effect Quickie will show you a real simple way to create a vibrant, poppy type in just a few minutes. It’s a great effect to use on promotional materials, posters, or even in website graphics!

Before getting started, you may want to grab a Pop-styled font to work with. Really, anything with a bold look will probably look great, but for that extra pop feel, you may be interested in trying out a font like:

CODE

http://www.dafont.com/club.font

(Free Trial Version, or $5 for the commercial version)
CODE

http://www.dafont.com/snow-dream.font
CODE

http://www.dafont.com/advert.font
CODE

http://www.dafont.com/pop-magic.font

document.writeln(”

CODE

http://www.smokeybear.com

Step 1 – Background
The background is a key element to this effect. If the background doesn’t give off a poppy, groovy sort of feel, the text alone may not be enough to compensate for the loss.

Start out with a base color of your choosing (I chose an especially bright Lime Green: #b7f22b), and fill the entire background layer of your document.

Create a new layer.

Now, using a white foreground color, and a soft (0% hardness), large (300px-ish) brush, make a few dabs in your new layer. Set this layers blending mode to Overlay.

Repeat this process of adding new layers, painting a few dabs on each, and setting them to overlay to build up a nice lighting effect as shown in the example on the right. Varying the size of the brush, and overlapping your dabs will help add depth to your background.

Step 2 – Setting the Type
As suggested earlier, using a bolder typeface is probably a good idea for this effect, as legibility may become a problem with something too small or thin. Another thing to keep in mind when setting the type is the actual placement of letters. Since this is more of a Pop-culture effect, we want the actual placement of elements to depict such a style.

For inspiration on type placement, try exploring various avenues that are well integrated in Pop-culture to see how they design their graphics. I tend to see more abstract combinations of text in such areas, along with frequent use of placing text at angles, and fitting words into one another. On a final note, to make this specific effect work best, you should use a White Font.

Below is an example I put together using CLUB and Impact:

Reduced: 97% of original size [ 591 x 350 ] – Click to view full image

Step 3 – Setting Up the Layer Style
Go into your text layers Blending Options (Right Click Layer > Blending Options).

Apply the

CODE

http://www.tutorial9.net/photoshop/photoshop/layer-styles-in-photoshop/

shown below, making any modifications as needed.

Drop Shadow

Reduced: 97% of original size [ 591 x 410 ] – Click to view full image

Outer Glow

Reduced: 97% of original size [ 591 x 410 ] – Click to view full image

Gradient Overlay
We’ll need to build a custom gradient for our gradient overlay effect. If you’ve never built a custom gradient, I suggest taking a look at our

CODE

http://www.tutorial9.net/photoshop/layer-styles-in-photoshop/

prior to this step.

The gradient should be setup as follows: