How to Make Photoshop Logos

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Zach Katagiri, freelance graphic designer in New York City, and today, we are talking about Photoshop. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use Photoshop to make a logo. While a good logo uses some kind of image that relates to the specific personality of a company, I'm going to show you a generic logo that uses a few Photoshop tricks that, perhaps, you can keep in mind when you're working on your own projects. So I've got a document open, called it logo, and the first thing I'm going to do is throw a shape up there. So let's use the rounded rectangle tool and that basically just fill up our workspace. And I'm going to change the color to red. Now, if I hold down Control -- on the Mac, it's the Command key -- and click where you see shape, then it'll select that entire shape. And now, I'll create a new layer. Okay. And use the rectangular marquee and make sure that the type of marquee that you're going to make is an intersection. So what this will do is it will leave selected the intersection between the shape that is right now selected and the rectangle that I make with my rectangular marquee. So the overlapped area now has remained selected, which is cool because it keeps the rounded corners. Now, within this part that I've selected, I'm going to throw in a gradient. So I'll choose the gradient tool, and make sure I have the right type of gradient. So I'll go from 100 percent opacity to zero, white to white. So I'm just going to have a white gradient fading out, and I'll start a bit above and drag down. And now, I've created a gradient. So I don't actually want the entire thing, so I'm going to go to selection and modify and contract, so I'm going to basically just bring the parameter of that selection in. And I'll bring it in by four pixels. And then I'm going to inverse that selection and delete, so that now we have a nice, little border. And I'll click away to de-select. Now, I'm going to use the type tool to type in our quote, unquote company title, or just logo. And I'm going to make that really fill up the space. No. 24 is close. And we're going to move this down a bit, and let's make the color a dark blue. Okay. And de-select so you can see what it looks like, and I'm going to try to just bold this up a little bit so I'll go into my character palette and let's make it bold. Maybe stretch out those letters just a bit and bring them closer together. And maybe just make that area bigger. Cool. Now, I'm just going to mess around a little bit with the layers, get them to pop out and fall back, so I'm going to go to my gradient layer and I'm going to go layer, layer style, and bevel and emboss, and I'm just going to bring it up a little bit. Let's give it a little bit more height and we don't need it too soft, so click okay. And you can see that it's popping up a little bit. And now, I'm going to go to my logo and first, I'm going to rasterize the type -- it makes it an image you can work with. And now, I'm going to go back to layer and layer style, bevel and emboss, and this time, I'm going to bring it down a little bit. And I'll bring it down about the same amount that I brought the other layer up and soften it just slightly, click okay. And now, you have what looks like logo hammered into some sort of object."