Design How-To: Adding Photographic Texture to Type

John McWade

This story is taken from “Before & After” Magazine.

Adding texture to objects makes them more interesting, whether they be in the three-dimensional world or on a two-dimensional page. But finding suitable textures can be tricky, especially when masking textures into type outlines. Some pre-packaged textures look contrived. Others are so complex as to detract from the letters, rendering the type unreadable.
The trick is to make your own textures. You don’t need to photograph a wall or a rock to create texture patterns, however. Any old photograph can be turned into a texture using Adobe Photoshop’s array of filters. For example in the image below, the background texture was made from an ordinary snapshot of a picnicking couple.

In this feature from “Before & After Magazine,” find out how you can create textures from photographs and then add them to type outlines — all in Photoshop.
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