DT Blog Web Design Tips, Tutorials & More!

Retro-inspired art is very popular these days, and it’s really attracting design as well. You can make an easy typography poster with the help of this Photoshop tutorial. The main ingredients are a background stock photo, filters and blend modes, and you will have a unique and attractive typography poster.

First you need to find a good background for the poster. You can find these stock images for free from many websites like flicker or urbandirty.com you also need to find a good font to make it retro-style. A font ‘telegrafico’ suits our needs, and we will use it in this tutorial. You can download it from any good font site.

Step 1

First create a new layer in Photoshop and set the resolution according to your needs. The resolution should be aimed to be higher. For this very poster, we make it to be 1500×2000 pixels in size. Create a new layer and insert the background image into it.

Step 2

Double click the background image layer to select the gradient overlay option. It will create a transition look in the poster. You can decrease the opacity according to your needs. For now set it to 70%. The background image will now blend with the gradient overlay we used. Change the blend mode to multiply and scale at 35%.

Step 3

Now right click the ‘fx’ icon along the layer to separate the gradient from the background so that we can edit it later. Duplicate the gradient layer by right clicking on the layer and clicking ‘duplicate layer’ option. Now change the copy layer mode to ‘darken’

Step 4

Now write down text on multiple layers in ‘telegrafico’ font in the position you want to place the text in your poster. You can stretch the texts as shown in the image by just dragging along the alphabet.

Now after getting done with that you can select all the text layers and right click to select ‘Rasterize type’ allowing you to change the font of all the text at the same time.

Step 5

Select the layer of text and right click to select merge down, on top of your text layer. You can elongate the text like the alphabet P as shown in the picture with the help of ‘marquee tool’ so that the tail extends to all the way down on poster. You can do the same thing with many alphabets like ‘R’, ‘T’, X, etc.

Step 6

At the end select all the text layers and merge them. Now you can manipulate the single text layer the way you like to add some style and most importantly to make it look like retro-style.
You can select the ‘outer glow’ style in the styles’ menu of that layer. Set the size to 13px and opacity to 70% keeping the size around 20%. This will result in double-edged alphabets that look very great.

Step 7

Now add the paper text (you can download it from flicker) to the top of all layers and set the mode to ‘hard light’ and also set the opacity to 70%. This will lead the color and texture to come from the bottom and present a vintage look.
You have created the poster. You can add a few tweaks if you want to like use the soft paint brush to dab the spots in black around the text to present a centered lighting effect. The things used in the making of the poster, mainly were the blend modes and manipulating with the layers. More skills can create the poster like this in no time at all.