I love typography and I love making designs with type. Today, I want to teach you how you can use type to create a cool background design in Photoshop. This is an intermediate tutorial in which you will be using the type tool as well as different blending modes. This beautiful typography background design can be used as poster art, in your website designs and even for your business cards.
Here is the design we will be creating:
Read the steps below and if you get confused, there is also a short video at the end of this tutorial to help guide you through the steps. Good luck and have fun!
Step 1: Creating the Background
Open Adobe Photoshop. Create a new document that is 1000px by 675px. Choose any random photo that uses a nice colour palette. It really doesn't matter what the image is of. Just chose an image that has the base colours that you would like to have in your background design. For this tutorial, I chose a photo from one of my earlier posts, 18 Free Photography Wallpapers. Here is the one that I chose:
Open the image in Photoshop and place it into your new file. Resize the photograph so that it fits onto your stage. Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and drag the slider all the way to maximum so that the photo is almost completely blurred and you are left only with a great coloured foundation for your design.
Now, you need to find a good texture that you can add to your design to give it more depth. I got mine here however, there are tons of free textures available on the web. Just type 'free textures' into Google and you will come up with a lot of different choices.
Place your texture on a new layer on top of your blurred photo. Go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation... and drag the saturation down to -100. Change the layers blending mode to 'Soft Light' and decrease the layers opacity to a value that you are happy with. I set this layers opacity to 50%.
Step 2: Adding Text
Select the Type Tool from the toolbar to the left of your screen. Choose a font that you want to use in your design and start placing your text in your design. I used Helvetica Condensed Black. Use different font sizes and rotate your type at 45 degree angles. Set each type layers blending mode to 'Soft Light' so that the background shines through.
Step 3: The Final Touch
Now that all the text is added, I want to add a little lighting effect to my design to give it more life. Add a new blank layer to the top of your design. Set your foreground-background colour to the default black and white and drag out a gradient. Set the gradient layers blending mode to 'Overlay' and congratulations! You have created a very cool typographic background design.
Video Tutorial
Here is a little video to help guide you through the steps. Just as a little side note, I only start Step 2 and then skip to Step 3. It would be too long if I were to record myself placing all the text in the design so I just demonstrated placing the first few lines of text and then, I skipped to a more finished version of the design to show you how to add the gradient in Step 3.