How about a new tutorial this week? I'm going to show you how to create an easy logo in Photoshop Elements. I first want to note that when possible a logo should be created in a vector based program such as Illustrator, so you can scale it up & down without losing any quality. Not everybody has access to this, however, which is why I'm using Photoshop Elements for this tutorial (as a majority of my customers do use this).
So lets get started! I created this design:
using the following things:
Before you get started you'll want to find a graphic that best represents your image/brand as well as a font. When choosing your graphic make sure it is OK for commercial use and for use in logos. I do allow all of my clipart sets to be used for logos but not everyone does. The same goes for fonts. While there are a lot of fonts out there not all can be used for commercial use.
Once you have your graphic/font all set open Photoshop Elements. I didn't really know what size I wanted to make this so I thought I would just start a new file that was 1000 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall and I could adjust it from there. When you create this make sure you make your background transparent. That way you can place the graphic on top of pattered/colored backgrounds without getting a white box around it.
Next I placed my graphic into the file. I went to the toolbar at the top and chose "file, place".
You'll notice that the camera graphic takes up almost the whole document so I decided to scale this down in size. To do this click on the graphic and you'll see little boxes come up in the corners. Just click on these and drag to your desired size. When you do this make sure you have the "constrain proportions" box checked at the top so everything stays in proportion. After I resized the camera I dragged it to the middle of my document. (and p.s. I'm sorry that the text on the screenshots is hard to read...I should have zoomed in a little more when I did this).
Next I added my text. I decided I wanted to just put my text under the graphic and I color matched the charcoal black color for "Erin Bradley" but for designs I put the font in all caps and did different colors (I'll do another tutorial at a later date on color matching!).
From here I saved the file in PSD format. Even though I was pretty set on the design I wanted to keep an original file in case I want to make changes or make this larger or smaller in the future.
There was still a bunch of blank space around the sides of the graphic, however, and I definitely don't want that when I use the file. So I used the crop tool to draw a square around the graphic. I don't like to leave a lot of extra space on these types of files because the blank space will save to the file and sometimes can throw proportions off a little bit. Once I got this cropped to a good place I clicked the green check mark and then saved this as a PNG file. Done!
When you create your own file you can obviously move your graphics/text wherever you would like. Here's another example with the graphic to the left and text to the right.
And your done! I'll do another post on how to use your logo and create more branding products so stay tuned! :)
Once you have your graphic/font all set open Photoshop Elements. I didn't really know what size I wanted to make this so I thought I would just start a new file that was 1000 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall and I could adjust it from there. When you create this make sure you make your background transparent. That way you can place the graphic on top of pattered/colored backgrounds without getting a white box around it.
Next I placed my graphic into the file. I went to the toolbar at the top and chose "file, place".
There was still a bunch of blank space around the sides of the graphic, however, and I definitely don't want that when I use the file. So I used the crop tool to draw a square around the graphic. I don't like to leave a lot of extra space on these types of files because the blank space will save to the file and sometimes can throw proportions off a little bit. Once I got this cropped to a good place I clicked the green check mark and then saved this as a PNG file. Done!
And your done! I'll do another post on how to use your logo and create more branding products so stay tuned! :)
