After a long period of making actions and styles from YT tutorials I came with inventing my own ideas. Layer style panel, if used properly, can in many cases replace 3D or 2,5D to be more accurate.

This was one of the first layer styles I came up with, I had seen many different letters made for countless number of businesses but I hadn't encountered anything for a construction industry, so I imagined it, and made myself. Seemed to went good enough, so I started to wonder what else I could do, cause despite using Photoshop for years, I wasn't very interested in text effects and it was kind off fresh experience for me.

I had started to search some inspirations with new fonts, as it turned out, some of them just waited to give me another Idea. 

There is plenty of tutorials how to make metal chrome gold or silver in Photoshop, but not so much describing methods of making rust effects, only one I found involved 3D, which is slow, and you have to render it every time you do sth new, and Photoshop renders slower than my grandma when she hobbles on second floor, so I made rust as a layer style, to be more precise a few layer styles in pack.

When I browsed fonts, I found this one. It was pretty self-explanatory to me, that it needs some dimension, cracking texture and nice multiple shadows.

This is the one I've struggled with the most. In order of bending line like I wanted, I had  to create a pattern brush in illustrator, but it couldn't be photo brush like I've done before, because they always make this one pixel thin brake between segments due to the clipping mask. At first, I thought, that I have to imitate somehow rope texture with Illustrator effects. I had tried many things, filters, filters with gradients, but nothing seemed to be realistic enough, and finally I was left with one way I didn't tried yet - traycing a photo to a vector, and then, when I appropriately prepared photo, trayced it, and made into a pattern brush it worked, barely, cause its quite heavy anchors and paths number.

For this one I've been inspired by Altered Carbon TV series, there was a character with bonsai tree passion, and I just liked CGI behind it. Then I had searched for tutorial for tree alike letters, but YT search engine spit back only wooden blocks, boards, but nothing with a tree bark. After a few examples before drill was simple enough, searching the tree alike free font-> finding desired color ->adding letters dimension with bevel & emboss and multiple drop shadows, enhance the dimension with inner shadow & inner glow, duplicate layer with 0% fill, use it to tweak it further and add texture pattern from wide variety of Photoshop defaults. Then duplicate layer again and mask to make small detailed leaves green, and as finishing touch I used my ivy photo brush, which I mentioned in one of my previous projects, masked unwanted details of it, and dodged and burned slightly to add more depth to it. After all of this I've added slight tilt shift to it. Long process but without much struggle.

This one I've made basing on evanto coffee letters tutorial, but with slight changes. First, I've cut leaf from a free stock photo website instead of making it in Illustrator, it was just faster. Then I had moved leaf with vector mask to illustrator, and converted it to symbol to speed up placing multiple copies and arranging it with symbol sprayer tool. When it had been shaped enough, I made second layer of leaves on the top, then I grouped it properly, expanded and saved as layered file to have each single leaf copy on separate layer. And, since Illustrator shadow managing wasn't designed for large number of objects, I did drop shadowing in Photoshop.

Another example of combining Illustrator and Photoshop to work together. I had made bullet in illustrator then converted it to pattern brush, painted some letters and exported it to Photoshop to add some BG, made shadows, and tweak some lights.

To be honest making letters is far less tedious than writing those captions below them ;)