Photoshop CS3 creating outlined logos

by Nicole Rutter

I just received a request for a blog entry for creating thick outlined logos in Photoshop CS3. Something that seems so easy doesn't always come out exactly how you want it unfortunately. In this example I am just going to do a real simple logo with a thick black outline. Feel free to play with the thickness of your lines in this example. Every font is going to be a little different.

Create a new Photoshop file with a white background. In this example I set mine to 900 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. I like to have plenty of room when I am designing and then I can just crop it down to size later. We are first going to select a font that would be good for a thick outline. You want to pick something that is a little heavy. In this example I am going to use Blackoak Std. Create a new layer and set your font size to 48 pt and black for the color. Type out the text of your choice. For this example I am just going to use my name.

Now double click on your layer that you just created with your text. This will open up your Layer Styles. First I am going to add a gradient overlay. You can use any colors of your choice. I am going to use greens for this example #1f6a0a -->#bdd75b.

We are also going to add a stroke within our layer styles. Click on stroke and set your stroke size to 13 and change the color to black. You may need to play with the settings a little. The goal here is to not have any white showing between the first line of text and the second.

Now you should have something that looks like this.

The black outlines are a little close for my taste so lets space this out a little better. Open your character window by going to Window-->Character. What we want to adjust is the leading. We set our font size to 48pt so lets set it at 46pt. You can see in the example below the red circle indicates the leading.

Now you should have something like this.

Now we can add a little bit of flair to this. I am going to use a fire custom shape that I found on Lady Oak that I am going to line up at the end of the logo. You can use anything of your choice for this. I just prefer fire because it flows well with a thick outline.

Okay so now we have a nice thick outline for our text and a little bit of flair. Lets add one more row of text. Create a new layer. I am going to use Charlemagne Std for my font and set the size at 24pt and the color to black. This just kind of helps finish off the look. You should end up with something like below. That's it...You really just have to play around with different settings to get exactly the look you are looking for.