Glass lettering in GIMP
Posted by Qrystal on February 7, 2008 at 23:30.
Category: Webmastering. Tags: beautifulphysics, logos.
I had a vision for my logo for BeautifulPhysics.com: I wanted the letters to look like they’re made of glass. Maybe, someday, I could even make it look like there are beams of light shining through the letters, complete with refraction and reflection and dispersion effects, but like so many things, starting simple is best.
My first inspiration was to check CoolText, to see if they’re still around after all these years. Happily, they not only still exist, but they’ve vastly improved over the way they were back when I first encountered them — which could have been as early as 1999 or even ’98, so I suppose it’s only to be expected. What amazed me though was that I had no idea how awesome they’d be, and I’m not even done playing yet!!! But at first glance, nothing seemed to look quite like glass. I did find myself drawn to the glowing letter style though, and after much trial and error, I found a look I liked for the Qrystal.name logo:
As for the Beautiful Physics logo, I was still smitten with my glass idea, so I googled about a bit, eventually tweaking my search terms to include GIMP in my results. Aha! A tutorial! I cackled, and sat down to try it out… because, after all, the only way I could visualize how it would look as a logo would be to go through the steps myself!
I was fairly pleased with it, but I’d like to tweak it a bit before I use it. I’d like to see how it looks as thicker glass, and of course I also need to figure out what I’m doing with the word “beautiful”. I’m saving all steps though, and I’ll blog about any progress as I go! Yippee~!
Update (Nov 2010): A REQUEST: If any visitor here happens to know of a different tutorial, or better still, some kind of tool that does this automatically, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS! It would be very helpful to other visitors here too, because this little post brings at least one or two visitors to my blog every day, and I’m sad that I don’t really provide much help. However, this means there are a lot of people looking for something that will do this, so I don’t think such a tool exists yet… but IF YOU BUILD IT, PEOPLE WILL DOWNLOAD IT! So please, let me encourage you to build it! I think all you need to do is create an interface that goes through the steps of the tutorial above, so that it can be undone and tweaked and redone quickly so people can get the desired look.