You may not believe it, but old-style text designs are coming back into fashion in a big way!  With a basis depending entirely on rainbow gradients, they may seem difficult from the outset but they are, in fact, simplicity themselves to create and only require simple Photoshop tools.

Step 1:  Create a brand new document of a suitable size with a single background layer filled with a solid white colour (you can change this later - the white just makes the first few steps easier). Use the Horizontal Type Tool to create a word in pure black. In my case I've used the 'Soul Papa' font at size 110. Don't worry if you don't want to use this particular typeface - just select something with a solid bulky retro feel (script-style fonts rarely work well).

Step 2: Now to taste the rainbow!   With the text layer selected, select Layer > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay from the application menu and duplicate the settings opposite. The gradient itself should be included with Photoshop (you won't have to create it manually). Step 3: Don't press the OK button yet - We now get to the most "retro" part of this tutorial! Navigate over to the Drop Shadow section of the Layer Style window and enter the settings indicated in the image on the bottom-left. This will give your text a curvy stroke effect. Step 4: Now navigate over to the Inner Glow section and enter the settings on the bottom-right. This will make your text appear much smoother.  When finished, press OK to close the Layer Style Window.

Step 5: Now take a look at your text.  As you will undoubtedly notice, there are a few areas where the drop shadow hasn't quite covered the area perfectly, leaving holes between characters.  Fix this by creating a new layer on top of all the others (and especially the text layer), and then use the Brush Tool with a black-colour tip to paint out the problem. Some typefaces are more prone to this problem than others, so if the area affected is large, I'd seriously consider choosing another typeface. Variations: And we're done! At this point you may want to add other retro objects such as stars, bulky underlines, and other junk to augment your text, but we'll leave this up to you.  Have fun, and remember that you don't need to go through this tutorial again for each and every object you add to your creation - you can just copy and paste layer styles across by right-clicking on the text layer, choosing Copy Layer Style and... well... you can guess what you need to do to paste them to new objects... ;)

- Tutorial written by Turvas

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