Filling a logo with a pattern

- Sometimes you're working with a logo and you feel that it just needs a bit of texture. Maybe it's on parts of the elements or maybe it's woven into the typography, and Photoshop makes this pretty easy. Now, this isn't a technique that I use that often, but it does work well, particularly in small doses. Let's start off with the basics. Here I have a text treatment from a kids' program that I worked on in the past. And if you see here, it's all about layer styles. It starts with a color overlay and then a pattern to give it a little bit of breadth. Moving in there, you see that this takes on a bit of a burlap. But with a satin overlay, it starts to have some natural shading that makes it look like it's been displaced a bit, and that combines nicely with the bevel. What we have here is something that looks like it was literally stamped into some fabric and it has a more organic feel. And all of that was done very easily with a layer style. Remember, layer styles are not just simple things that come with Photoshop. You can easily make your own set or explore some of the other styles that are available. Here is an example of taking this to the extreme. So let me walk you through a couple of these. Here's some rust, and the ruts is being built up using a combination of effects, in fact, quite a bit. It starts with a little bit of a bevel and an inner shadow, and that combines nicely with the color and gradient. Now as we start to put all of that together, you'll see that it comes through very well and so that pattern overlay really becomes subtle. So I took the actual pattern here, there's tons of patterns built into Photoshop, and you can make your own, and that really started to stylize it. And then using a little bit of color and gradient overlays, I was able to get that to have much more of a natural looking metallic. Now this is available in the downloadable files and you can easily right click to steal one of these effects, so if you just click on copy, you can copy that layer style and move it across. There's an arctic type treatment, a little bit more of a turquoise blend, a soft spray painted look that just is really a white overlay with an outer glow, but makes it look like it's a bit more distressed and photographic. And as we go through here, you just see lots of options that I've created, including my ogre look, which I'm not afraid to admit, is essentially Shrek typography. And again, these are not hard. When you combine a simple gradient with a bit of an outer glow and then play with a stroke and an emboss, all of a sudden things come to life. And these are not hard to do. Notice there that little bit of a stroke at the edge just helps that text become looking like it's live or 3D. But everything's totally organic. So here's this wet chrome, and I want to reuse this actually. So I'm just going to right click on this and choose copy layer style, and come on over to this logo text treatment. I've got a logo split into two pieces, and I'll paste that layer style here to reuse it. You'll see that what that did is it made a chrome look. Now, a little stronger than I want, let's make this background black now. But I could refine that, because everything in the layer style is a live effect. So the drop shadow, that's a bit too big, so let's just pull that in, there we go. A little tighter, that worked well. And we'll size that down just a bit with lower opacity, and then looking at the gradient here, that feels pretty good. But the satin texture's too strong. So we'll pull that down for size and definitely take the bevel down here. So you see that we've got a lot of options on the bevel, we can refine that there, and what I'll do is just pull that in a bit so it's not so intense. Now all of these work together. And so as you're playing with this, if you get a look that you like, you can always refine it. And so I'm going to start by turning some of these things off and building it back up. Drop shadow feels good, bevel feels close. So looking at that contour there, let's go a little harder. And you see that the different styles work well. That's going to go with a pretty straight one there, that looks good, and let's put a little texture in there. I'll click, and what I want to do is choose from some of my many options here. I'll choose the erodible textures, which is a default set, and that just gives this a nice sort of distressed look. And we'll scale that up a bit. If we zoom in there, you see that it's starting to really take on a metallic sort of damaged texture. I like how that feels, I'll decrease the depth so it's not so strong. And now toss that gradient overlay back on. Now all I'm using here is from a preset, the metals category. And you can choose from these, there's all sorts of options. That feels pretty good there, I like what that's doing. But I'm just going to adjust the angle a bit, and switch that from radial to more of a linear gradient, so it has a harsh light sort of feel. That looks good, I like where that's going. And let's just put a little bit of a glow on that. There we go. Help that edge come through, there. That looks good, I think I'll just lose the drop shadow altogether and put a bit of color on there. Let's just grab something that has a cool blue, there we go. That feels good, and I like that. It's got a nice, distressed, sort of spongy feel. Now let's go after the splat itself here and we'll just build this up from scratch. Clicking on the effects here at the bottom, I'm going to start by the satin overlay. And satin is a great way to add some displacement to a surface. And then simply adjust the size and play with distance and it starts to look a little bit more like live liquid. Note that there's lots of options here to play with to sort of move that around. I'll put a little bit of a bevel on that, and what I want to do here is get a nice smooth bevel at the edges, and that starts to feel like it's live paint. I like how it looks like it's sitting on the surface and it feels a bit more like live liquid there. That feels pretty good, let's play with the contour, get a nice, rounded edge. And then we'll introduce a slight pattern overlay. I really like these patterns. Remember, lots of options to choose from, let's just go with something simple like artist surfaces. We'll introduce a little bit of irregularity there. Blend that up, and then of course, change the actual blending mode to something like soft light or overlay, and you see that those textures start to mix in. So what you could play here is with those options, that looks pretty good there in hard light, I just wanted a little bit of modeling to the paint. Let's try vivid, that looks even better. All right, that worked out nicely, and we'll mix these here so they all come together. There we go. Blend that in, that feels pretty good. And I like how that all comes together. If you don't feel like one pattern's working, just mix it up, you've got lots of options there that you could try and you just blend them together until you get some of the results you want. That feels pretty good actually, let's just lower that opacity. And what I've got now is a logo that feels much more three dimensional. And remember, with the layer styles, everything is absolutely live. You can turn it off and back on, you can go in and turn off the individual components to refine it, and if you decide that the texture is or isn't working, it's yours for the tweaking. Remember, everything is here so it's very simple for me to modify this as I see fit. Bevel a little too strong? No big deal, I could back that off or switch that to an outer bevel to punch the edge. And that really changed the overall effect there. In fact, I think I like that, let's make that a little bigger, and now that distressing is going at the edge of the text while the front of the text seems a little bit cleaner although it has sort of its own spray paint look. That feels good, and I'll call it a day, but remember, when it comes to layer styles, you have complete flexibility and all sorts of textures that you can access with a simple click.