So, have you ever been watching TV and for some unknown reason the thought comes to you to recreate a logo. Well, god only knows how many logos I see in the course of the day but it just happened that the Volkswagon logo caught my eye on TV today. It looked easy enough so I decided to recreate it. Of course this isn't perfect mind you - I don't have a whole lot of time to disect a logo and find the perfect font and all that but I think its pretty close and it looks cool - isn't that all that counts?
A note before you begin: This tutorial was created for Photoshop 6 although most steps should work fine in version 5. Notice to Mac users: I use keyboard shortcuts extensively and am on the windows platform. Your shortcuts will differ slightly Ctrl = Command, Alt = Option and right-click = Control + click.

Step one:
Let start with a blank image that is 250 px x 250px. The VERY first thing I always do is to double click on the background layer to bring up the layer properties box. It should have "Layer 0" already specified as the name so just click OK to make that a real layer. Now, lets create a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N) Next, select the circular marquee tool ("M") and create a circle that is 150 pixels wide. Don't forget to hold down Shift to constrain the selection to a perfect circle and make sure you have your info pallette visible so you can see how big the circle is. You should now have something similar to my picture.

Step two:
Next, set your foreground color to RGB (117,157,205) and your background color to RGB (0,51,102). Select the gradient tool ("G") and switch to the radial gradient ( ). Make sure you have foreground to background selected as your gradient type. Now draw a line from the top left to the bottom right of your circle. Yours should look similar to what I have here.

Step three:
OK, we're under way now. As you can see we have made a sphere that looks like it has this light blue highlight in the top left area. Why don't we go ahead and acentuate that highlight a little for some added reality. Select your airbrush tool ("J" - that one always confuses me - what the heck does J have in common with airbrush??). Set your Pressure setting down to like 7% or so, select a 20-some pixel soft edge brush ( ), and set your foreground color to white. Now paint a few dots in the brightest blue area to make it look like there is a bright highlight there. Should look similar to this.

Step four:
Ok, we're done with the sphere. Now lets spice it up. First, select the sphere (ctrl + click on the layer). That will bring up the marching ants circle that we started with. Next, create a new layer (Ctrl+shift+alt + N). We want to make that marching ants selection an outline so go to Edit -> Stroke. Enter 6 pixels for width and click on the color swatch. Select RGB (153, 153, 153) for the color and make sure the center is selected as the location. Click OK and now you have a grey outline around the sphere.

Step five:
Now, before we go any further lets add some guides to help us later on. First, go to View -> Show Rulers. Also, under View make sure that "Snap" is checked. Then select the grey outline layer. Next, position your cursor in the left hand side of your image in the ruler area, click and drag out a verticle guide. As your dragging and you near your image you will notice that the guide snaps to the edge of your grey outline. Go ahead and drag out another so you have two verticle guides - one on the left edge and one on the right. Now do the same thing from the top. Position your cursor in the top ruler area and drag down two guides for the top and bottom edges. Finally we want to find the center of the circle. The failsafe way to do this is to hit Ctrl + T - this brings up free transform. You'll notice that you see a point in the middle of the circle. This is the exact center point. Now all you need to do is drag a guide from the left and one from the top. As you approach the center you'll notice that the guides snap to that center point. Neat huh?

Step six:
OK, now that we have the center we can create the inner white circle. First, create a new layer (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N). Then select your elliptical marquee tool ("M") - place the crosshairs at the center point of your circle (where the two guides intersect) and draw a circle that is 110 pixels wide. You want to draw the circle from the inside out so hold down Alt - you also want a perfect circle so be sure to hold down Shift. With the marching ants still marching (meaning, DON'T deselect yet), go to Edit -> Stroke. Enter 9 pixels for the width and select white for the color. Cool, now we have the inner circle done.

Step seven:
Now we'll create the VW inside. To do this, we'll create two V's and merge them together along with some modifications. The font I'm using is Lucida Sans Console. It seems to be the best match I could find. First create one V on its own layer. Use a 100pt font. Make sure it is white. Now comes a tricky part. (Tip: Before we move on you may want to zoom in on the image so you can fine tune it easier - I made is so the circle takes up almost all of my screen.)Using the move tool ("V") position the V in toward the lower left of the inner white circle so the bottom of the V is touching the bottom of the white circle. Use my picture as a guide.

Step eight:
Now the tricky part. To me, the logo looks as if it is two V's crossed with the inside top end of each V extended upward. So that is what we're going to do. But we're just going to do this with one V - then we'll duplicate it and flip it so we don't have to do double the work. First, click on your V layer. Next select Layer ->Type->Create Work Path. Now select the Pen tool ( ) and hold down the mouse to bring the flyout menu up and move down to the "Convert Point Tool" ( ). Now click on the top right end of the V and extend it upward until it intersects with the white circle. You'll have to eyeball this one a little because there is no way to constrain your movement to stay at the same angle as the V currently is.

Step nine:
When you're happy with your result, go to the Paths pallette and click on the third button from the left ( ) to load the path as a selection. Now go back to your layers pallette, right click on the V layer and select "Rasterize Layer". You should still have the selection
that we created from the path going, so all we have to do now select white as your foreground color and click Alt+Backspace to fill. Now if the edges of the V extend out beyone the inner white circle, go ahead and use the eraser to touch up and erase them.

Step ten:
Next, we need to duplicate the layer so click Ctrl + J to make a copy of the V layer. Then on your V Copy layer, hit Ctrl + T to bring up free transform. Then right click somewhere in the transform area and you will see a menu - select Flip Horizontal to flip the second V and press enter. Now position the second V similar to how you have the first one but on the other side.

Step eleven:
Ok, we're getting there. But the way that we have the top of the VW just doesn't look right . So we're going to delete the top part and insert another whole V in there. First, merge the two existing V layers together (select the top V layer and hit Ctrl + E). Select the new layer with both V's on it. Now select your rectangular marquee tool and make a rectangle similar to what I have (a). Then hit delete to delete that area from the layer. You should now have something similar to the middle picture here (b). Next, create a new type layer and type a capital V - same settings as before. Right click the layer and select Rasterize Layer. Then position it like I have in the bottom picture (c). Finally, erase any portion of the V that extends outside of the white outline circle.

Step twelve:
OK, its looking pretty good but the white parts need a little shadow to give it a more realistic feel. The problem is that if we apply a shadow to any of the white layers now, we will get undersired results because there are several layers and the shadows will overlap. The
way around this is to merge the layers. First make sure your layers are in this order from bottom to top (blue sphere, grey outline, white outline, two merged V layers, top V layer). So go to your top V layer and click Ctrl + E to merge down. Now all of your V layers (left, right, top) should all be in one layer. Do the same thing one more time so the V layer merges with the white outline layer. Now we can apply a drop shadow to the layer. For the settings I left everything the default except for the distance and the size which I took down to 3. I also bumped the opacity up to 95% because the shadow looked like it was a little harder to me.

Step thirteen:
We're almost there. Its looking great now but we need a little depth and light for some added realism. Why? Because if you look at the logo, the light seems to be coming from the upper left corner - we know this because the sphere has a highlight in that area and the shadow we just added to the white parts seems to have light coming from that direction. There couldn't be a shadow if we didn't have light. But the actual white outline area of the VW layer and the grey outline don't seem to be showing that there is any light present. We can fix this pretty easily using lighting effects. Its under Filter -> Render -> Lighting Effects. First select the white outline VW layer and then go to lighting effects. Use the settings that I have provided here (you can click to enlarge if you can't read the settings). Make sure you position your spotlight to the upper left. You may have to play with it a little - what your going for is to have the top left half of the VW/white outline area to be just white and then have it gradually fade into a light grey. See the finished product below to see what I mean. Next, we need to do the same thing for the grey outline so select that layer and run the same lighting effect. The only thing you should have to change intensity down to around 29 ish so you don't wipe out the grey outline in the top left. The key is to experiment with what looks good and learn how the settings work.

Step fourteen:
Finally for some finishing touches, add some text on the left side and you're done! I just expanded the canvas size here a little more to the left. I used a 20pt. Verdana font and added "Drivers Wanted.". Its not exactly the font that they used for VW but its the closest I could find in any decent amount of time searching.