How to design this neon sign
- prettygeek
- Jun 10, 2015
- 2 min read
I've never actually written a tutorial so we'll see how this goes.
I designed this neon sign in Photoshop and animated it in After Effects. I will upload the video later where you can see the lights flicker.
To start:
I first found a font that I like best to use for a neon sign, you can use Photoshop fonts or download fonts from the internet, I downloaded this font from the internet called Beon. Once I choose my font, size and color I added layer style; inner shadow, outer glow, inner glow and color overlay. Now this is an art, so you play around with those layer styles until you're happy with your color and glows, etc.
Next, You always want to sell your effect, so DETAIL is KEY! In order to sell that this is a real neon sign sitting on a brick wall, I added a metal light holder (I don't know what that's really called) but something that the sign will obviously be mounted on. You can design this yourself or get images on online.
Once you have a nice design of your sign on a transparent background, you will go ahead and save it and now we are going to throw this into After Effects.
In After Effects you start a "New Composition" I always do mine at 1920x1080. Import your Photoshop project as a composition (this way, all your layers in Photoshop will be imported in After Effects as a composition). Next add your brick wall image (grab one online) and put it below the sign layer.
Then after I added my brick wall, I added a new black solid layer (command y) and put that layer on top of the brick layer.
Play with the opacity and blending styles until you're happy. I also added a pink solid layer on top and featured it to like 300% that way it sells that "glowing off the wall" effect.
For advance: You can add glow effect to your text layer and animate it so it looks like the lights are flickering.
Render and boom, a neon sign!
After writing this, I realized this is obviously for someone who A) Has the programs I am talking about and B) Definitely knows their way around these programs and knows design. Well I hope this was helpful.
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