Make Designing Neon Signs a Snap

Here are 24 Neon Layer Styles for Photoshop that will make the process of making neon signs so much easier. It will apply the glowing neon style light to any vector in photoshop. Once installed, all you need to do is select your desired layer and click on one of the neon styles. Then watch neon style light up your design. 

The Layer Style file contains 24 different colors to choose from (taken from the most known neon sign manufacturers) making the job of building neon signs super quick and easy. Here's the photoshop tutorial and download instructions for this resource:

How to install

1. Open Photoshop.
2. Go to Window > Styles.
3. In the Styles Panel, click on the top right icon and from the dropdown menu select "Load Styles".
4. Locate the "Medialoot - neon layer styles.asl" file and click "Load".

How to use

1. Select your text, raster or shape layer and click on any of the 24 neon layer styles to apply it.

Some Tips

1. If you are using a text layer, we recommend you use a neon styled font like Neon Tubes at 160px size.
2. For outlined shapes, we recommend a minimum of 10 pt stroke.
3. If you want to scale up/down your final image, be sure to check the "Scale Style" option in the Image Size dialog box.

Some Goodies to Use With Neon Layer Styles

In the last couple of years this style has become more popular in graphic design — the neon sign look is coming back in vintage and retro styles all over the place. In 2017 it's all digital, but to really grasp the look, it's great to remember its origins: the signs created by painstakingly bending glass tubes into letters and forms, then filling the tubes with neon gas. When electrified, the tubes lit up with a gleaming, gaudy brilliance. So when you use this style to build beautiful and authentic digital graphics, don't forget that hipster-via-the-80's vibe comes from real materials that have real, gritty looks. 

Recreating them is super popular, but can be time-consuming — that's why we've created a ton of resources and tutorials to help hit the throwback look, as well as to use with this Neon Layer Style resource specifically. Rather than build a light effect or neon text effect from scratch, you can use pre-made resources to create your designs, or to enhance a design you've already begun. We've included some of that good neon stuff here. Take a look!

Neon Tubes Font

If you want to get the best neon light effect, you should use it with a beautiful neon font. This typeface is the exact right thing to combine with the Neon Style resource, to get that neon text effect to perfection. Throw your letters up on a brick wall, and you've got the spot-on retro look, with way less work. This font actually comes as a package filled to the brim with glowing, perfectly throwback neon resources. Get the whole pack and you will be set for your neon life.

Neon Sign Mockup

Here are all the individual elements to work with to make your sign. Plugs, wires, brackets, lines, and curves — everything you need to build a neon sign to light up with the Neon Layer style. These are great for making your signs look rounded and real, without have to bevel and emboss them yourself. 

Neon Effect Type

If you want a truly realistic-looking Neon sign lettering, but don't want to do any of the hard styling legwork, this is for you. Rather than a simple font with no styling, these are highly rendered photoshop images that you can mix and match to make a sign that looks spot-on, with nearly no hands-on. 

Create an Easy Neon Light Text Effect in Photoshop

Or if you want to take the whole style into your own hands, you can use this free tutorial to walk you through how to get this effect without buying anything already-built. This tutorial is great for understanding what makes neon get that characteristic glow, and how to recreate it. You'll learn how to highlight, shadow, and make a lovely glowing effect that nicely captures the lit up look of neon gas.

Those are our neon looks — use them to get that real "gas lit up in a tube" gritty glow without doing the styling work yourself. If you want to see more amazing Neon effects, resources, and fonts, here's a roundup of great fonts to choose from, as well as a discussion of what makes them so great. Or you can learn from this tutorial how to make your own neon font in Illustrator! The Illustrator tutorial is great for learning how to make a font in general, as well. 

If there's something in the neon world you want and we don't have, reach out to us! We love to listen to our users, and will often build requests.