Photoshop Typography

Why Your Text Effects Look Fake (And the Layer Style Settings That Actually Fix It)
Typography & Text Effects

Why Your Text Effects Look Fake (And the Layer Style Settings That Actually Fix It)

I used to think more was more. Drop shadow, bevel, emboss, gradient overlay, outer glow, stroke. Stack them all on, crank the opacity to 100%, and call it a day. My early freelance work had text so overloaded with layer styles it looked like WordArt had a fever dream. Clients didn’t always complain, which was somehow worse, because it meant I kept doing it. It took a friend pointing at one of my thumbnails and saying “why does that text look like it’s floating in a different universe than everything else?

Why Your Text Effects Look Cheap (And the Layer Style Fixes That Actually Work)
Typography & Text

Why Your Text Effects Look Cheap (And the Layer Style Fixes That Actually Work)

A client sent me a revision note last year that just said “can you make it pop more?” No context. No reference image. Just that. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that “pop” is designer-speak for “I feel like something is missing but I don’t know what.” Nine times out of ten, the problem isn’t the font choice or the color. It’s that the text is sitting on top of the image instead of feeling like it belongs in it.

Why Your Photoshop Text Effects Look Cheap (And the Layer Style Habits That Fix Them)
Typography & Text Effects

Why Your Photoshop Text Effects Look Cheap (And the Layer Style Habits That Fix Them)

I spent the first two years of my freelance career absolutely torturing text in Photoshop. Drop shadows on everything. Bevels so thick they looked like the letters were crawling off the screen. I once handed a client a logo treatment where the text had a glow, a stroke, an inner shadow, AND a color overlay all stacked on top of each other. The client loved it. I look back on it now and feel a kind of physical pain.

Why Your Text Effects Look Flat (And the Layer Style Stacking Order That Fixes It)
Typography & Text Effects

Why Your Text Effects Look Flat (And the Layer Style Stacking Order That Fixes It)

I had a client last year who wanted a vintage stamped-ink logo treatment. Simple enough brief. I spent about two hours getting the texture right, the distressing looking natural, the letterforms feeling worn without looking broken. Sent it over. He came back with a screenshot of something he’d found on Pinterest and said, “Can you make it look more like this?” It was almost exactly what I’d made. Almost. The difference was this subtle inner shadow that made the letters feel pressed into the paper rather than printed on top of it.