A Handy Guide to a Carpenter’s Logo

This entry was posted By Cubert on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It takes the right tools to make the right tools, and using those tools can be easier than you think. Today’s tutorial guides you through the making this handy carpenter’s logo, and shows you that you can make a design pop with several simple but invaluable methods. In conclusion, you should keep these techniques near the top of your tool bag, as they might just be the right tools for your next job.

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Step 1: Create and Color a Circle

First, let’s start with a new document with the size of 800 x 800 pixels. Now, create a new layer, select Ellipse Tool (U), set your foreground color to #daac73, and draw a circle that fits the canvas.

Step 2: Add Inner Shadow to the Circle

Now, let’s add some effects to our circle. Right click on your circle layer, then go to Blending Options, Inner Shadow, and use #e4b71c for multiply blend mode, capacity 89%, and size 87 pixels.

Step 3: Bevel and Emboss the Circle

Then, go to Bevel and Emboss, select Inner Bevel style with the following settings:
Depth 1000%, size 10 pixels, soften 16pixel, #b26300 for the color, dodge highlight mode, and #4e281d for the multiply shadow mode.

Step 4: Apply a Gradient Overlay

Next, go to Gradient Overlay, select Soft Light for the blending mode with 76% for the capacity and scale 135%

This is how your circle looks after completing steps 2-4:

Step 5: Add an Image to your Logo and Emboss it

Now let’s find your image and place it in the canvas. Obviously for this theme a tool image will work best, but you can use this same technique to create a logo for any topic.

After the image is placed onto the circle, we need to give it a little depth, so we will emboss it. Go to your image layer, right click on it, select Blending Options, go to Bevel and Emboss, select Outer Bevel Style, enter 674% for the depth, size and soften 16 pixels, use #fdda9c for the lighten highlight mode, and #b67833 for the multiply shadow mode.

This is how it looks:

Step 6: Duplicate the Image

To enhance the aesthetics of the logo, we will add in a second image and criss-cross it across the first one so that it looks like a cress. The easiest way to do this is to create a duplicate hammer layer. Therefore, go to your hammer layer, right click and select Duplicate Layer. Then, click Free Transform (Control T) to rotate and move your hammer to something shown below:

Step 7: Add Your Text

Now, it’s time to add your text. This logo uses the font face called Impact and the color of the font is #b67833. Type your text in and place it in the center like so:

Step 8: Warp the Text

The first step in styling this text is to warp it, which is just to say we will cause it to bend to both sides. Press (T) for your “type tool”, and select “create warped text”:

Then, select Arc Upper and bend 35%:

This is how it looks:

Step 9: Add an Inner Shadow and Stroke to the Text

There are really two parts to this step, which are the inner shadow and stroke effects.

For the first part, right click on your text layer, go to Blending Mode > Inner Shadow, and enter 100% for the capacity, distance 2 pixels, and size 8 pixels