For this project, I'm using my own logo which is the first two letters in my business name. These are a solid black filled lowercase d and an uppercase C (see screenshot).
Our first design will be to add color and a stroke to the two letters (see screenshot). You can set both letters to the same font color or assign a different color to each letter.
Let's add the logo to our canvas and try this first technique.
- Click File - New and open a new canvas that is 1000 x 1000 pixels. That should be large enough for a few versions of our logo. (see screenshot)
- With the Type tool, add your text logo to the canvas (see screenshot).
- In the Tool Options panel, set the Font, Font Size and Style of your choice (see screenshot).
- In the Layers sidebar, right-click on the layer containing the starting logo and choose Duplicate (see screenshot).
- With the duplicate layer selected, drag the second logo to the right of the original on the Canvas.
- Select only the first letter of the duplicate logo with the Type tool (see screenshot). Just place your cursor between the two letters and drag over the first letter.
- In the Tool Options pane, let's set the color for the first letter. Click the Color Well to open the color picker and choose a color (see screenshot).
- Repeat these steps for the second and subsequent letters in your logo.
- With the layer still selected, click the Style tool to open the Tool Options pane.
- In the Tool Options pane, you should see a Fill, Stroke, Inner Shadow and Shadow style box, but they are turned off (see screenshot). Click the toggle button, to turn on the Stroke style controls.
- If you don't see these default style areas, click the Add Style button and choose Stroke.
- Let's keep the Stroke Style set to Color and the Color set to black. But we want to change the number of pixels to 1 px.
As this is the logo as it exists now, it will be our starting point. We will make a copy of this for each new design.
To finish the design, let's add a stroke to the letters.
- Duplicate the original logo again.
- With the duplicate layer selected, select the Style tool.
- In the Tool Options pane, click the toggle button to turn on the Fill Style controls or click the Add Style button and choose Fill.
- In the Fill control area, click the arrow icon to open the popup menu and set the Fill to Gradient (see screenshot).
- By default, the gradient is set to Linear. Let's use this, but you might want to set a different gradient type.
- On both edges of the gradient bar, you will see two small colored squares. We will use these to set the two colors for our gradient.
- On the Canvas, you will see a control handle for changing the gradient position (see screenshot).
- Click the left colored square to open the color picker and select the first color for your gradient (see screenshot).
- Repeat the previous step for the second color in the gradient.
- On the Canvas, use the control handle to position the gradient as you like.
- Follow the steps above, to add a Stroke to the letters in this logo design.
- Gradient Controls
Pixelmator Pro screenshots used by permission of the Pixelmator Team.