I love the effect on the bottom right, and the orange all around the sig. The text is very bad, but still looks good because of it's color and how you blended it, very nice.
Actually i use neither of these techniques you described i did not u bevel i used a clipping mask on the text and i used a render and made the background myself
Well it looks like a bevel. I still think it's kind of boring. Maybe because the render takes up most of the sig. I think if it was bigger canvas you could have done more with it.