For quite a while I had been considering creating a digital signature, or simply a logo to embed into the pictures that I share publicly either on Flickr or Instagram. I did some research, and interestingly there are a ton of ways to create them, ranging from the usage of fonts from the Adobe site to creating your free-flow sketch and post-editing them.
The latter method is more complicated and needs a lot of patience, especially for post-editing. I have a WACOM tablet which I primarily use for casual sketching purposes. The pen pressure works well with Photoshop to bring out interesting letter styles. However, I’m not fluent in calligraphy to get a reasonable base lettering up. After a few tries, I felt it was not my game (at least for now)! Having said that, it’s something worth trying for some customized signature that you would wish to create. Photoshop also has good smoothening features to help control your brush movements.
What I ended up resorting to was the more simple font usage. You can browse through a good repository of font packs at fonts.adobe.com and enable them in your Photoshop installation.
I picked up a couple of fonts of my interest and customized the letters using the Character options.
Once you get your desired result, it’s time to save it for reuse. You can either save them in PNG format with a transparent background (which essentially means, the only pixels saved are those of the character strokes). I would recommend storing both a black and white version of the signature which can be used interchangeably on dark and light images to pop up the right contrast.
Another interesting process I learned was to export the characters as a brush preset and simply choose the brush later for any embedding.
I ended up with a light and dark version of the signature logo. And this is the final result!
