A round stamp has the shop name arched over the top and a short line, often a founding year, along the bottom, both reading the right way up. Doing that by rotating one letter at a time takes a while, and the spacing never quite comes out even, because wide letters like M and narrow ones like I get the same turn. A vector editor can lay the letters along the circle itself. The steps below use the Vector Editor in the osFoundry desktop app, with a made-up coffee roaster, KUMO COFFEE ROASTERS, and EST. 2026 underneath.
Draw the circle and copy it
Start a new document (the Social Square Post size works well for a logo), press L for the Ellipse tool and drag out a circle. The one here is 450.6 px across. Before doing anything else, press Command-C (Ctrl-C on Windows and Linux) to copy it.
The copy matters because once you type on a path, that path belongs to the text. Two lines of text need two circles in exactly the same place, and the copy gives you the second one later.
Put the shop name on the circle
The Type on a Path Tool is not under the Type tool. Hold the mouse down on the Area Type tool in the toolbar, and it is in the flyout that opens.
With the tool picked, click the bottom of the circle and type the name. Press Command-A to select the text, set the size to 40 pt and the weight to Bold in the Character section on the right, then click Center under Paragraph.
The text jumps from the bottom to the top. On a closed path, the point you click is where the path starts, and centred text is centred on the point halfway around from there. Clicking the bottom puts the middle of the line at the top, which is where a stamp wants it.
Add the bottom line
Press Escape to leave the text, then Command-F. That pastes the copied circle in front, in the same position as the original. Pick the Type on a Path Tool again, and this time click the top of the circle. Type the second line, give it the same size and weight, and click Center. By the same rule, it moves to the bottom.
It is upside down. Text on a path follows the direction of the path, and along the bottom of a circle that direction runs from right to left, so the letters stand on their heads.
Flip it and align it to the ascender
Switch to the Selection tool (V) and click the bottom line. In the Type menu, open Type on a Path and choose Type on a Path Options.
Tick Flip. The text now runs the other way along the path and reads correctly, but it has also moved to the other side of the line, so it sits inside the circle while the top line sits outside. Set Align to Path to Ascender to fix that: the path now runs along the tops of the letters instead of their baseline, so the letters hang outside the circle, in the same band as the name above. Click OK.
The Effect menu in the same dialog has other ways to bend the letters, such as Skew and Stair Step. Rainbow, the one already selected, turns each letter to follow the curve, which is what a stamp needs.
Add the rings
Draw two more circles with the Ellipse tool, one a little larger than the text and one a little smaller, centred on the first. With each one selected, press / to set the fill to none, and type 3 in the Stroke field.
The letters are spaced by their own widths along the curve, so a narrow letter takes up less of the circle than a wide one, and the gaps between them look the same as in a straight line of text.
The Vector Editor is one of the apps that come with osFoundry, and the desktop app is free from the download page for macOS, Windows and Linux.
