Twine Text

You can make great looking logos and headers by twining your text.  What do I mean by twining?  Twining means in a sense, weaving letters together.  Look at the two images below.

These are simple examples.  You can get much more involved by incorporating shadows.  The first thing you need to do is pick your letters.  Open a new canvas for each letter, then apply a linear flood fill.  I had mine set to 90 degrees, while using light gray and charcoal as the gradient colors.

You then need to decide how you want the letters to intertwine.  For this example, I wanted the letter "I" to run in front of the top of the "E" and behind it's middle leg.  I wanted the "M" to weave through the bottom of the "E".  You'll also notice I made the "E" larger than the other letters.  I did this for emphasis.

I needed to make my cuts so I used the selection tool and selected the middle leg of the "E", copied it, pasted the cut as a new image and then cut the selection.

I then copied and pasted the letter "M" to a new layer where I thought I wanted it to rest on the "E".  By doing this I could see where I needed to make the next cut on the bottom leg of the "E".

Yes, that's it.  Just that little tiny piece.

Now, I started putting the image back together again.  I copied and pasted the letter "I" as a new layer, placing it where I thought I wanted it.  Then I copied and pasted the middle leg of the "E" as a new layer where it belonged.  The last thing to do was to copy and paste to a new layer where the little section over the "M" was.

Once you have the image pasted back together and have arranged the letters how you like them, you need to turn off the background layer.  Furthermore you want to merge the visible layers and turn on the background again.

Next, using the selection tool on the merged layer, select the background and then any white space in between your letters.  Invert your selection.  Add a new layer and choose a color.  When choosing a color, try to stay on the medium dark to dark side of the color scale.

Using the flood fill tool, set it to solid followed by flood filling your selection.

Now, using the layers palette, set your transparency down, (I usually set it between 25 and 32) then create a new layer, and apply a white cutout with a fairly large blur, set to about 10-13.

Using your eye dropper, pick one of the lightest shades on your letters and then lighten it even more.  Create a new layer and apply a drop shadow and set the blur to about 13.

Finally, choose a tile, create a tile, or use a solid color.  Deselect your selection and apply a flood fill to your background layer.   You're done!  Pretty simple way to make classy logos.

*One of the keys is to work with layers for each element.  It makes it easier to move separate elements when things need to be adjusted.