Quick Steps to Design a Floating Logo for Your Business using GIMP

Motive: The motive of this lesson is to design a 3D floating logo which will look like the one below:

If you are familiar with GIMP, follow the steps below, and If you are completely new to GIMP and find these steps hard to follow, please visit 3D Floating Logo tutorial.

Step 1: Open GIMP and create a new image of 250px(width and height).

Step 2: Fill out your new image with black color.

Step 3: Add the text you want to make the logo for and increase the font size and font family as per the requirements.  

#Tip: Change the foreground color to something other than black (White color text will be a nice option for a black background).

Step 4: Once you’ve got the text how you want it, you need to create a new layer from all the visible layers so far (the text layer, and the black background layer).  

#Tip: Select and Right click on the text layer in the layer palette and select New from Visible.

Step 5: Apply a Gaussian Blur to the newly created layer(Visible) through Filters → Blur → Gaussian Blur. Tip: Add blur radius to 7.0 for both horizontal and vertical fields and hit OK.

Step 6: Create a new layer for your image first. Tip: Right-Click on the “Visible” layer in the layer palette, and from the context menu choose “New Layer".

Step 7: Fill the new layer with some color. To do this you will use the Plasma plugin from here Filters → Render → Clouds → Plasma. Tip: Default values for Plasma plugin are good, but you can change the values as per your want.

Step 8: Bump Mapping: In this step, we’re going to use the text we created earlier to generate a fake 3D shape on this plasma layer. To do so go to Filters → Map → Bump Map. Select "visible layer" from Bump Map drop-down and set the depth to 6(you can set it as you need). Advice: To get Bump Map working correctly, this plugin requires that you properly point to the source for the bump mapping(Visible layer).

Step 9: Apply a Layer Mask - To add a Layer Mask you need to Right-Click on the plasma layer and choose “Add Layer Mask” from the context menu.

Step 10: Copy the "Visible" Layer and paste it into the Layer Mask you just created. This will insert a Floating Selection (Pasted Layer) into your image. Now select the Floating Selection in the layer palette and Anchor it through Layer → Anchor Layer.

Step 11: Add a new layer to the image and move it below the plasma layer. Now fill the image with an interesting color.

Step 12: Adjusting the Levels - In this step, select the layer mask to make it active and through Colors → Levels try to clean up the edges of the text with what we have so far.

Step 13: Creating a Drop Shadow - In this step, we need to make a copy of your “Visible” layer that had the original blurred text on it and move it just below the plasma layer. Here we need to do 3 things:

1. Select the visible copy layer to make it active and do Colors → Invert.
2. On the same "visible copy" layer use Layer → Transparency → Color to Alpha.
3. While holding shift Move the "visible copy" layer to a bit down and to a bit right so that it will become a shadow for your logo.

#Tip: You can also apply a Gaussian Blur with a 10px radius, and adjusted the shadow layer Opacity down to 80.  

End Steps: Export your logo in the required JPEG or PNG format.