Photoshop Logo Tutorial: Step-by-Step Tutorial to Create a Business Logo with Photoshop
October 15, 2013 by
What’s
the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘Coca-Cola’? A
polar bear? A glass of delicious bubbling beverage? Or maybe, those
famous swirly white letters against a red background?
Try the same for Google. What do you see? The Google homepage with its blue and yellow and red colors, of course!
That’s the power of logos. Even though Google makes a ton
of products, you don’t think of vast data centers and offices filled
with programmers when you think of Google. No, you think of Google the brand
with its slightly eccentric and nerdy logo. Same goes for Coca-Cola.
Even though Coca-Cola actually sells a beverage you drink almost every
day, your first thought when was of the company’s logo.
Designing logos is an exercise in narration. A great logo
tells a story – what is the brand? What is it about? What are its ideals
– in as few brush strokes as possible. Google’s nonchalant disregard
for conventional logo designs (the logo was hacked together by Sergey
and Larry and has remained the same for 15 years) immediately tells you
that this company is different. It doesn’t care about the
status quo. The Coca-Cola logo, on the other hand, has remained
unchanged for over a century. It’s an instrument of nostalgia that
gently reassures you – whatever else might change, your favorite
beverage is going to remain the same, no matter what.
Designing a logo is the first step in building a business. You can learn more about designing logos in this comprehensive logo design for beginners course.
In this blog post, we will learn how to design a simple logo for the world’s favorite fictional company, Acme Corporation.
What We Will Make
We will use Adobe Photoshop CS6 for this tutorial, though you’ll be perfectly fine with older versions of Photoshop as well.
Want to use Adobe Illustrator? Learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to design logos in this course.
Step 1: Create a New Document
Go to File -> New, or press CTRL+N in Photoshop. Select
the appropriate width and height for your design. I like to have a large
enough canvas to work with – around 1000px width and 600px height. You
can always change canvas size later.
Step 2: Create the Basic Shape
To create the effect that we want, we will make our ‘A’ with two overlapping shapes as shown below:
We’re going to use the ‘Pen’ tool to create our shapes. It’s the pen shaped icon on the toolbox to the left.
Now create a new layer. Name it Shape 1. Select the pen tool, select ‘shape’ in the tool properties at the top. Choose a bright red color for the fill (I used #ed1c24).
It’s useful to switch on the grid while drawing. Go to View -> Show -> Grid, or press CTRL + ‘. Create the shape as shown below:
For the second shape, instead of drawing it from scratch, we can simply duplicate the Shape 1 layer and flip it horizontally.
Select the current shape in the layers window on the right. Right click on it and select ‘Duplicate Layer’. Name the new layer Shape 2 you want.
Now select the duplicate layer, go to Edit -> Transform Path -> Flip Horizontal
You should have the following shape now:
Drag it over to the right so that it overlaps the first shape perfectly as shown in the images above.
Learn how to create 9 different professional logos in this course.
Step 3: Change Colors
Since we want to create an overlapping ‘Origami’ like
effect, we will make one of our shape layers slightly darker in color to
give the impression of depth.
Double-click on the Shape 2 thumbnail in the Layers window. The color selection pane should pop-up.
Select a slightly darker shade of red. I choose #b00309
While you’re at it, drag the Shape 1 layer on top of the
Shape 2 layer in the Layers window as well, such that Shape 2 appears to
be behind Shape 1.
Step 4: Creating the Shadow
Duplicate the Shape 1 layer as described above. Name it Shadow Layer
Change the color of this new layer to black (#000000). Go to Filter
-> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Choose a radius of 2.75 pixels. Your
image should look like this now:
Now drag the Shadow Layer underneath Shape 1 in the Layers window. Right click on Shadow Layer and select ‘Create Clipping Mask’
Your image logo should now have the nice shadow effect.
Step 5: Add the Text
We’ll now add text to our logo. Unfortunately, the default
Windows font selection isn’t exactly too great. So instead of using
tired, stale fonts like Arial, we’ll head over to Google Fonts and download a bunch of new, modern fonts.
For this project, I recommend downloading Raleway.
This is just a personal preference though. You can choose any one of
the hundreds of free fonts on Google Fonts. Some of my personal
favorites are:
-
Open Sans
-
Roboto
-
Ubuntu
-
Exo
-
Lobster
-
Bevan
Once you’ve installed the Raleway font (extract the
downloaded .zip file and double-click on the font-name to install
automatically), head over to the ‘Type’ tool in the toolbox and add your
text.
I choose Raleway with font-weight of ‘bold’ and a font-size of 200px. Feel free to experiment with this if you want.
Place the text below the logo. For a bit of extra effect,
add a drop shadow to the text. Right click on the text layer, select
‘Blending Options’. In the window that pops up, choose ‘Drop Shadow’ and
pick the following parameters:
Step 6: Add a Background Gradient
This is the final step to give our logo a bit of dramatic flair.
Click the ‘Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer’ button at the bottom of the Layers Window.
Choose ‘Gradient’. In the window that pops up, select
‘Radial’ under Style. Make sure to check the ‘Reverse’ option at the
bottom. 
Now, double click on the gradient color in the window. The
gradient edit window will pop up. Play around with the colors and
settings for a while until you find something you like.
As a final step, drag your gradient layer below all the other layers in the Layers window, which should look like this:
Your logo is now complete!
Next Steps
Designing a logo takes a lot more than learning a few Photoshop techniques.
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