I *heart* Photoshop! I *heart* internet! I *heart* designers!

I was asked to design a certificate, which will be handed out to participants to a course that my company is giving. The team who manages the course will need something like a template where they will simply type the name of the participant and the date when they took the course. Since we do not have Photoshop installed as standard in our work PCs, the simplest and easiest way is to create the template in PowerPoint.

As I began designing the layout, another “challenge” appeared. If I used fancy fonts, i.e. not Arial or (heaven forbid) Times New Roman, then these won’t show up properly or might just display weird characters (like Times New Roman). To overcome this “challenge”, I created a box in PowerPoint (no background colour), selected the fancy font and typed the text. Once I’ve set the right colour, size and spacing, I then saved that object as an image. This is done by selecting the text box then on the right-click menu, choose ‘Save as image’. Once I’ve saved the image, I deleted the text box and inserted the image into my PowerPoint slide template. I did this for all the non-standard fonts that I decided to use for the layout.

The final object that I wanted to put in the certificate template was a dry seal to give a bit of an authentic look. And since we actually don’t have a dry seal in the office, I opted to create one in Photoshop instead. This is when I turned to the internet hoping that the Photoshop gurus would have already written a tutorial – and there was one. However, it wasn’t exactly the dry seal I was hoping for but what I ended up creating was even more posh (for lack of a better word to describe it). I created a wax seal, like those in the olden days.

The tutorial I followed was from pshero entitled Old World Wax Seal. I followed it step by step until I reached step 16 where it talks about inserting a custom shape. And because my wax seal was to be used for the certificate, I wanted to use the product logo as the shape at the centre.

This presented my next obstacle. How do I create a custom shape out of an image or text? I turned to Google and found another Photoshop tutorial from photoshopessentials.com entitled Save And Re-Use Text As A Custom Shape. Followed that to a ‘T’ and got my new custom shape saved. I went back to my wax seal project and continued from step 16 until the end. I didn’t bother with the adding of string stuff, though.

So I made my first wax seal in Photoshop. But it didn’t look professional because the edges were wonky. I know that wax seals don’t really make symmetrical edges without a mould but since this was to be used for a business course, I thought I’d do something different.

Going back to the wax seal tutorial, instead of using the Pen Tool in steps 1 and 2, I used a custom shape (a starburst) to create the path of the outer edge and an ellipse shape for the inner edge.

Below is the final result of my wax seal in Photoshop project.

Creating a wax seal using Photoshop

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