logo design help

They have: 34 posts

Joined: Oct 2001

ok. i have the logo drawn up and i'm ready to begin designing it.

what programs do you use? illustrator, photoshop, freehand?
what should the final product be? CMYK, RGB, etc.?

as you can see i'm fairly new to this...

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

Use whatever graphic program you have or are comfortable with, they all pretty much do the same job except some cost 5 times more than others Smiling

most graphic programs out there offer free 30 day trail versions, other not so known ones are freeware, shareware or even postcardware.

Some programs like photoshop give great end results but do take a little longer to learn the workings of them, but in saying that, someone to paint shop pro etc could as easily get lost.

end result - depends on your colors, if you use few colors save as .gif, if you use very detailed images, like photos etc with many colors save as .jpg (jepg) but only save jpg once, the more you save it the more it compresses, the more distortion you get, save as .bmp until you are 100% happy with it then save as .jpg

Brian Farkas's picture

They have: 1,015 posts

Joined: Apr 1999

Quote: Originally posted by getyourbiglobst
ok. i have the logo drawn up and i'm ready to begin designing it.

what programs do you use? illustrator, photoshop, freehand?
what should the final product be? CMYK, RGB, etc.?

as you can see i'm fairly new to this...

I like illustrator for logos that require vector graphics, photoshop for simple logos. When you're saving the logo, it should definitely be in RGB color, as CMYK has problems displaying on the web.

Good luck!

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

If possible, design it in a vector format. That way you can easily rasterize it for the web, choose CMYK for print, have different sizes and options that are as easy as clicking off layers/objects, et cetera.

I would seriously not recommend Photoshop or any other non-illustrator tool. Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator or any other FULL illustration program would be the best bet.

You can export it to .eps for importing it into a raster program like PhotoShop, or save to web formats right from the vector/illustration program.

For print issues, you should talk to a printer about formats -- usually convert text to curves, consider amount of colours involved (more colours = higher cost of printing).

For web issues, logos are usually best as .gif because a good logo has few colours, distinct lines, et cetera. There is an essay at http://www.4guys.com/essays_evolution.cfm about designing logos, and a series by Gary Priester on the topic starting at http://www.unleash.com/gary/logo/logo1.html

Best of luck!

Smiling Suzanne

Want to join the discussion? Create an account or log in if you already have one. Joining is fast, free and painless! We’ll even whisk you back here when you’ve finished.