Create a Hipster Logo – Photoshop Tutorial

Video

1. Start With The Right Background

Having the right background is essential for your design to look great and also look like it belongs where you design it. I’m going with a seafoam green, textured background on my Photoshop document which is set to a size of 1920 x 1080px. TIP: Grab a great texture from a site such as http://lostandtaken.com

2. Start With The Right Typeface

There are lots of “old world” typefaces out there and available, but you can take a font and round all the edges as I’ve done here. I’m using the typeface “Kankin”, but as I mentioned, I rounded all the corners. There is a great free typeface we’ll use for this run through this tutorial called “Blanch” and you can grab it here » Type the word “Philadelphia” in the center of your document.

3. Type Settings

Open the Character panel and check out my screenshot to see my settings. Size: 192.50pt. Style: Caps. Tracking: 25. Tick on “Faux Bold”.

4. Angle Text

With your Type layer selected, go Edit>Free Transform and look to the top of the Photoshop window and over on the right side there is a small input field to set the vertical skew. Enter “-11” into that little box.

5. Roughen Text Edge

We need to add some variation to the edges of this text. It’s too clean, too perfect, not hand-crafted, not ‘hipstamatic’ enough. Go Edit>Free Transform and increase the width and height of your type 250% and commit that change. Next right-click this type layer in the Layers panel and hit “Rasterize Layer” NOTE: If you’ll want to remember your typeface or edit the type later on, simply duplicate the Type layer (Cmd/Ctrl + J) and hide it by clicking the little eyeball.

6. Roughen Text Edge Pt. 2

Now go Filter>Distort>Zigzag and check out my screenshot for the settings I used.

7. Size The Type

Next convert this to a Smart Object by going Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object and then go Edit>Free Transform and set the width and height of this to 40%. This will return our type to right about its original size when we first typed it.

8. Stroke It!

Go Layer>Layer Styles>Stroke and set a 4px solid black stroke as I have onto this Smart Object. This will increase the overall weight of our type. With the Layer Style dialog box open choose the “Blending Options:Default” button near the top left of the window and tick on “Layer Mask Hides Effects”. Hit “OK” to commit the changes.

9. Grunge Brushes & Masking

Look around the web (Hint: Brusheezy) for some great grunge brushes and download some and load them into Photoshop. Now go Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All to add a mask to this current layer. Set your foreground color to black (D) and choose one of your grunge brushes and slowly and gently start clicking around the edges of the text and change the brush size a bunch and also use different grunge brushes to keep things mixed up and natural looking. Paint in that layer mask until you get a nice grunge bit of text.

10. Adding The Emblem

There are loads of free graphics and brushes you can use to add emblems to your Hipster-style graphics. I’m using a brush set here called “Animal Brush Set 2” which you can download here » I’m going to grab one of the cool brushes here. Create a new layer and name it “Emblem”. With your foreground color set to black, click once to drop this bird above our type. I set my brush size to 175px. Drag to the approximate center of the document.

11. Texturize The Emblem

Add a layer mask to this layer and texture this bird as we did to the text.

12. Dancing Script “Eagles”

Grab the font “Dancing Script” and add the word “Eagles” beneath our main type and center it up as I have and set the size of the type to “140pt”. Texturize this type as we have done to the other elements.

13. Hipster Notes

Grab the Type tool (T) and use the typeface “Essays1743” set to 26pt with the default “Medium” weight. I’m typing little bits of information about the team such as “Born”, “1933” and “Phila.”, “Penn.” to indicate when the team started and where they are located. Texturize each of these Text layers just like we did the others.

14. Adjustments And Positioning

Next grab your Move tool (V) and go through all of these layers and move them around until you get a great composition according to your taste.

15. Adding The Ribbon

I like to draw simple elements, but if you have a great brush that you can use for the ribbon, go ahead and create a new layer and drop a ribbon shape below the entire logo. Texturize as we have done with the other elements.

16. Type And Masking

Grab the Type tool (T) and use that same “Essays1743” font and type the words “Bleed Green”. I set the size of the type to 20pt. Select the “Create Warped Type” button up in the control bar and choose the “Flag” style and set the Bend to “-32%”. Cmd/Ctrl + Click the Layer thumbnail over in the Layers panel to load this new text as a selection. Select the layer that has our ribbon on it and select the Layer Mask on that layer and go Edit>Fill and choose “Black” as the fill. NOTE: Make sure you hide your text layer which contains the white “Essays1743” type so you can see the cut out in your ribbon.

17. Finalize

A few final tweaks and adjustments to sizing, positioning, and masking and you have your final hipster logo! Select all the layers that contain the logo and drag them to the new layer icon and then hit Cmd/Ctrl + E to merge to one layer and then shut off all the other layers except for your background. You can now color this layer by clipping a color fill layer to it as well. I used a very light, desaturated yellow color.