Here’s a fun Halloween typeface you can build right in Photoshop in five easy steps!

Step 1: Type something up in your favorite spooky font and kern it as needed. I used Manson in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The original type layer.

Step 2: Duplicate the type layer by dragging it to the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette. Make the original type layer invisible by clicking on the eye icon next to the layer.

Step 3: Select your duplicate layer and select Filter -> Distort -> ZigZag. You’ll be asked if rasterizing the type is okay, which it is, and then you’ll see the ZigZag dialog box. There are many ways you can distort your type with this filter, and I suggest you play around with the settings as there’s some really cool tricks you can do here. In this case I used the settings of Figure 2.

Figure 2: Settings for the first of two ZigZag filter effects.

Step 4: Repeat the filter if you want more modulation. I made a second pass with the settings in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The second ZigZag filter effect.

Step 5: Turn on the visibility of your original type layer to achieve Figure 4, a very spooky typeface for Halloween! Depending on the typeface and the filter effect, you may want to kern your original type layer again to match the filtered text (see Figure 5).

Figure 4: The two layers combined! It’s alive!

Figure 5: The final type, after some kerning.