Helio's old avatar just has a really nice look to it, so I thought for a while about how he must have done it and tried to come up with the recipe. I did this a while ago, and some steps could probably stand to be updated, but it still works well enough.
This probably differs slightly from his method, but it's what worked best for me in trying to reproduce it (I'm sure he'll chime in if I get something wrong).
Anyway, we're going to be creating an image like this:
You will need the
Gridmaker plugin effect to complete this tutorial.
We start by creating a new image in PDN with dimensions of 200x200px
Pick a primary and secondary color (I recommend using black as the primary and a well-saturated color for the secondary...this is a matter of personal preference, so let your taste guide you), and use the Gridmaker (Effects -> Render -> Grid/Checkerboard Maker) plugin to create a checkerboard pattern on the background layer.
Next, blur the background layer a bit with gaussian blur (Effects -> Blurs -> Gaussian Blur)
Create a new empty layer, and use the circle selection tool to create a circular selection slightly smaller than the background (I kept one square of padding on all four sides)
Change your secondary color to fully transparent, and fill the circle with a linear gradient from top to bottom (black on top fading to transparent at the bottom), then radial blur at about 10 to smooth things out around the edges
Invert the selection (you can use [CRTL] + [I] for that) so that the area *outside* the circle is now selected. Swap your primary and secondary colors (make transparent the primary and black the secondary), and change the fill type to radial gradient (the circular one). Start at the center of the image and adjust things until you get the effect you want
Next, we'll add the glossy highlights around the circle. Create another new layer (leave the outside of the circle selected),change your primary color to white, and draw some lines around the corners of the circle.
Radial blur at 40-50 (or whatever looks best to you) to get your highlights
Now we'll give the circle its "glassy" look. Make a new layer and invert the selection again (should be back to the inside of the circle). Resize the circle until it starts at the top of the original one, comes down about 2/3rds of the way to the bottom, and about 2/3 of the way out to either side. Change the gradient type to linear, and make your primary color white and your secondary color transparent. Then, fill from the top of your new selection area to the bottom
One more highlight to finish this layer off. Make the selection area a bit smaller, and do the same gradient fill again
Okay. Now we have a reasonably good looking place to put our name. Let's make some glowing text and put it where it belongs.
Create a new layer, set your primary color to black, and pick a font. I used 28pt "Space Age" from
http://www.dafont.com.
Center the text and duplicate the text layer.
Hide the upper text layer, and work on the lower one. From the adjustments menu, click on "Invert Colors" (this should give you your text in white). From the Effects Menu, apply "glow" with the default settings, then duplicate this glowing text layer
Unhide the top (black) text layer
Almost done...we need to put the shine on *top* of the text, so move the layer with the glossy highlights to be the topmost layer
The edges of the shine look a bit ragged, but we made the image oversized on purpose. From the Image menu, click on "resize" and change the dimensions to 100x100px
There you have it. A few simple effects combined in a particular way can give you a good result. As always, these are just guidelines, and you may come up with some interesting new ideas based on this one. Show us what you can do!
drakaan
, they match quite well. 
