Hipster chalkboard look and feel

Written by Nick Georgiou on 16 February 2014

Let’s explore what goes into a chalkboard look and feel. There are a few simple elements that appear in nearly every chalkboard design. We’ve collected them here as a handy reference. There are a heap of free resources available, so you can create the chalkboard effect in Photoshop or similar in a really short amount of time.

So what goes into a chalkboard style?

Chalkboard style: how to easily make a chalkboard look and feel

You can easily create the chalkboard look and feel by copying a few stylistic elements.

Chalkboard background

With the chalkboard background, you’ve pretty much got two options: green or black. You could try and create your own chalkboard background or just get one that’s freely available on the web. Here are a few free chalkboard backgrounds:

Chalkboard ornaments/dingbats

A big part of this style is the ornate patterns to accompany text.

Bergamot Ornaments – Free Download

There are a heap of free ornament dingbats that translate very well to a chalkboard style.

Chalkboard colours

Chalk colour palette

Just because you’re creating a chalkboard-style design doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with plain, old black and white. You’ve got colours to work with! Here are some nice pastel-looking colours for common chalk colours.

	Pink Chalk Hex: #f2a3bd RGB: 242, 163, 189
	Yellow Chalk Hex: #d6d963 RGB: 214, 217, 99
	Turquoise Chalk Hex: #6fe7db RGB: 111, 231, 219
	Purple Chalk Hex: #c4adc9 RGB: 196, 173, 201
	White Chalk Hex: #f4f4f0 RGB: 244, 244, 240

Outdoor Chalk colour palette

Chalk made for use on the street/outdoors seems to be more vibrant in colour than regular chalk. Here are some guide colours.

	Red Chalk Hex: #ed7777 RGB: 237, 119, 119
	Orange Chalk Hex: #fad48b RGB: 250, 212, 139
	Yellow Chalk Hex: #f5f9ad RGB: 245, 249, 173
	Green Chalk Hex: #bcdf8a RGB: 188, 223, 138
	Blue Chalk Hex: #94c0cc RGB: 148, 192, 204
	White Chalk Hex: #f6f4f1 RGB: 246, 244, 241

Chalkboard fonts

Some fonts work great for the chalkboard style. Here’s a hand selection.

Free chalkboard fonts

To see even more chalkboard fonts, see 20 Free Chalkboard Fonts by You the Designer.

Premium chalkboard fonts

If you have some money to spend, try out Thirsty Rough. There are lots of alternate styles.

Chalkboard Photoshop layer styles

To get that chalky look on the text, I actually used Photoshop styles. If you’ve never used Photoshop layer styles before, check out this amazing tutorial by Creative Market about How to install and use Photoshop Layer Styles.

Free chalk board layer styles (Free Download)

Unfortunately you have to download a huge 80MB ZIP file to find the layer styles contained in an ALS file (see above for the link to the tutorial about how to use ALS files). But it’s well worth it, the ZIP contains a bunch of useful resources including more chalkboard backgrounds, ornaments and textures.

More chalkboard resources

That’s all we have for now! We hope you found this collection of chalkboard style resources useful. If you have any more chalkboard styles that you’d like to share, please feel free to let us know in the comments. If you found this useful, share the love and click “Like” or “Tweet”!