Simple Abstract Text Titles With Photoshop

The Abstract Style in text is a mainstream way of displaying your print titles. From postcards, posters to brochures, magazines and catalogs, you will always see a couple of these designs sporting creative wild styled abstract titles to draw readers in and make the printed artwork look a lot more distinct.

If you want to try your hand on creating your own creative abstract text, then read the steps below. This should give you all the necessary instructions in creating your own abstract titles easily. Just try it out in your own Photoshop.

1. The first thing you will need to do is of course to create your new document. Size it as you need it. Set the resolution to 300ppi though, especially if you are going to use this graphic for your printed materials. To create a new document in Adobe Photoshop, simply press CTRL+N.





2. The next thing you will want to do is to setup your background. You can either create your own background or copy/paste a special graphic from the Internet. For our purposes we have pasted in a nice red grunge background for the design.





3. Now, type in your title text. Choose any font style you may like, however it is recommended that you do choose something that has thick character styles so that everyone can see the abstract design style created unto the text. Color your text white for now so that it is easier to see on our grunge background.





4. Now, select the area of your text by clicking on its picture Thumbnail.





5. Create a new layer by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N. Name it as your texture layer. Afterwards, click on the ÒeyeÓ icon of your original text to make it invisible. NOTE, that your selection area should still remain on the canvass or work area.





6. Before we create our texture, first setup your foreground and background colors. You will want to choose a light color on the foreground and a darker color on the background. Make sure that you match these colors with your background of course.





7. Once done choosing colors, select your texture layer and then go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds. Afterwards, deselect our area by pressing CTRL+D.





8. That should give you a cloudy look in our text. The next filter we will apply is the fiber filter. Go to Filter -> Render -> Fibers . This will apply the fiber filter to our initial cloud filter. Set the variance value to 20 and the strength to 5.





9. Afterwards, we apply another filter. Go to Filter -> Artistic -> Watercolor. When the filter gallery opens, change the values for our palette knife to these settings: a. Brush Detail: 25 b. Shadow Intensity: 3 c. Texture: 3





10. Now we have our grunge abstract texture. We will add in some extra layer styles. To do this, just right click on our texture layer and click on the item ÒBlending OptionsÓ.





11. The layer styles window should open. In this window, first click on the drop shadow checkbox. Then apply these values to the drop shadow properties. a. Opacity: 40% b. Distance: 5 c. Spread: 10 d. Size: 10






12. Then, click on the Bevel and Emboss checkbox. Apply these values to its settings. a. Depth: 800% b. Size: 1 c. Soften: 0 d. Gloss Contour: Shallow Slope Valleys, Anti- Aliased






13. Finally, click on the Contour checkbox. Click on the anti-aliased option, and then set the range to 50%.





14. Once done, you should have a fairly nice abstract text texture applicable to your grunge texture. Just vary the font styles, colors as well as the values in the filters we applied earlier to get different kinds of effects. Just experiment. Good Luck!

For more tips and tricks on Graphics Design, check out Printplace.com's tutorial section.

Create Gothic Bloody Text in Photoshop

If you are into that Gothic and Vampire type theme in your designs, then this tutorial is for you. Below are the detailed and quick steps into creating a gothic and bloody type text using Adobe Photoshop. This will help you effectively design halloweed themed posters and gothic-styled postcards. So just run through the steps below and see if you can do this.

1. Firstly, setup your new document. To maintain the high quality of your text effect, even when this is printed in posters and flyers, it is a must to use a value of 300ppi or higher in the resolution field of the new document window. Of course, set your dimensions as needed for your Photoshop Document.





2. Now, using the text tool, type in the text for your title. Of course, since we are going for a gothic theme here, we are using Gothic styled fonts. There should be plenty of free ones on the Internet so just research. For our example, we are using the gothic font style “Bastrada-K”.





3. Then, go to your layers view. Hold down the CTRL key and then click on the text thumbnail of your text layer. This should cause the text area of your text to be selected.





4. Afterward, press CTRL+SHIFT+N to create a new layer. Make sure that you have not deselected our text layer though while you do this.





5. Now, with the new layer activated, and your text area selected, use a WHITE brush tool to paint some white daubs into the text area. Make sure you use a brush that has a hardness value of 100%. This will be where our “blood” will flow down from. So you will want to place these on the bottom of the text.





6. Press CTRL+D to deselect our text area. Now go to Image -> Image Rotation -> 90CW. This will rotate our image to the right. Once there, go to Filter -> Stylize -> Wind. In the window that opens, set the Method to WIND and the Direction from the right. Then press ok. AFTERWARDS, press CTRL+F again to apply more wind effects. (Do not worry, you will see this soon enough).





7. Now, before we turn things bloody red and right side up again, first click on the LOCK Transparent Pixels option in the layers view.





8. Finally, edit the fill of your layer. Just go to Edit -> Fill… In the window that opens, select Use: Color… and then use the blood red color #660000





9. Afterwards, go to Image -> Image Rotation -> 90CCW to turn your text right side up.





10. Now, go back and select our original black text layer. Double click on it to go to the layer styles. First click on the Bevel and Emboss options and then apply these values. a. Technique: Chisel Hard b. Depth: 307 c. Size: 5 d. Rest use default.





11. Then, click on the gradient overlay option and then select a black and dark grey color as the gradient. Leave the rest to defaults.





12. Once, done, you should have a great looking, gothic, bloody text. Congratulations!

Check out the tips and tricks on Graphic Design at Printplace.com