This week, I created a chalkboard sign in Photoshop using free downloadable layer styles and various typography. For my design, I chose to create a sign for local Seattle coffee chain (and a personal favorite), Caffe Vita for an upcoming fictitious Valentine’s Day special.

Before I started my project, I added the already-created layer styles simulating a chalk pattern provided by my instructor to my layer styles. I went to my Styles panel and selected “Load Styles.” I then chose one of the instructor-provided chalkboard backgrounds, set at 600 px by 800 px, as the base layer of my sign.

I wanted to use a variety of fun fonts in my design in order to replicate popular chalkboard sign styles, so I canvased my favorite free font website, dafont.com, for new typography. For my text, I chose GrutchShaded (a hip serif for the name of the coffee shop), Moon Flower (a skinny hand-drawn type for that homemade flare), and Handy Handy (an obviously handwritten font to add to the realism of the sign). For consistency, I chose to only use two fonts for the majority of the design.

Typography used in this project

After I typed out my text, I added the chalk pattern layer styles I added to my panel earlier. I went to Window —> Styles to open my panel and went through each layer of text and added a colored chalk pattern. In order to vary the roughness of the chalk, I opened up the Pattern Overlay layer style menu and adjusted the scale of the pattern to fit my desired appearance for some layers.

Adjusting the scale of the chalk pattern overlay

I wanted to add some pictorial elements to my sign as well. Per my assignment instructions, I was only allowed to introduce pictures by way of wingding fonts. Again, I scoured dafont.com to find wingdings of coffee cups and hearts, to go along with the Valentine’s Day theme. I found New York, New York 2 (‘Z’ is a coffee cup), and heart-themed My Valentine’s Love.

When placing the coffee cups, I did so in two separate layers and flipped one cup horizontally (Edit —> Transform —> Flip Horizontal) in order for them to appear facing one another. I then joined these two layers so I could move and resize both cups at the same time. I also adjusted the scale of the pattern overlay.

When placing the hearts (in this case, “M”) I rotated the pictorial text about 45 degrees and adjusted the scale of the pattern overlay in order to appear like steam rising from the coffee cups.

I placed my instructor-provided decorative ornaments last by going to File —> Place Embedded and resizing the images (and my text) accordingly. I added the chalk pattern layer styles to these layers as well.

Finally, because I had so many different layers of text, I decided to group relevant layers into folders to improve my file organization.

See my final sign below! I really like the overall effect the chalk pattern layer style gave the typography and I think with the right choice of fun and handwritten fonts, the effect comes across fairly realistically. Now to crack how those baristas actually hand-draw those cool signs without any help from Photoshop!