Create a neon sign

There are many ways to create a neon sign, but I can guarantee that this is the fastest and simplest one.

Choose a bold font and type up your sign. Fill it with black on black background. At this point your sign is off. 🙂

Let’s switch it on. Click the first icon from the left on the bottom of the Layers palette to add a layer style. Choose Stroke and follow the settings below. Make sure you choose a big number for the Size, such as 35. Select Position: Center. Fill Type: Gradient. Style: Shape Burst.

Click the gradient to bring up the the Gradient editor window. Here you need to create a gradient with blacks on the edges, the same bright color at 25% and 75%, and white in the middle. You can add new color stops by clicking at the bottom edge of the gradient. Delete them by selecting and hitting backspace. Edit their color by double clicking them. Click OK to go back to the Layer Style window.

As a last step click the Outer Glow layer style and select a similar color to the one you have chosen for the gradient. Choose a low Opacity but higher numbers for Spread and Size.

The cool thing about this technique is that everything is in vectors, so the PS file for download will be tiny (so it’s cheaper for me to provide the download link 😉 and you can freely resize your artwork to any resolution.