Web 2.0 logos with Paint Shop Pro

[Brian Turner]

Was going to post this in Platinax, but as I've just updated my blog and given it a spit of polish, I ended up posting it there:

Web 2.0 logos with Paint Shop Pro

Of course, I had to go out and buy Photshop CS2 before I realised I could get neat effects with my old PSP 7.

It took asking for basic logos from DigitalPoint members, who tendered and then couldn't be bothered to reply, before I decided to experiment and look for a way of doing the same myself.

Now doing the reflective effect on most of my new sites.

[tamecrow]

Yeah, PSP isn't at all bad really but I used Photoshop in one of my old jobs as the company standard and now I'm used to that :-)

[lin robinson]

I use photoshop for some things, but find some cheap and free programs better for creating from scratch.
Gimp is cross-platform and quirky, but can do some great stuff.
Paint.net is tremendous for certain tasks, like zooming and rotating things to match. I use it a LOT for animation. Nice, simple intuitive stack of layers, also.

My standby has always been Paint, actually. Sure, it's a kidstuff program, but there are things it does that really help in blocking out and adapting. The ability to just draw boxes of color across the canvas is really valuable. I like the simple transparent way you can compile images together, as well.

Also, Photo Toolkit is a free program that only does a couple of things (like get rid of redye) but on thing it does is a freeform morphing and distortion that is extremely useful. PSP has the same feature.

I've gotten a lot of use out of some nice little free .gif animators, as well. I recently replaced a java script that rotated images on a site with a simple animated gif that does the same thing without getting MS Explorer all hysterical about activeX content. I don't like the use of flash on sites (mostly because of stupid application, but still...) and don't feel the need when I can animated with gif files.

[lin robinson]

On the other hand, I did this one in GIMP in about 5 seconds, hitting typed it in and hit three buttons in Cool Metal off the Alpha To Logo filter.



I'm telling you, if you are mostly doing logos and gradients and shit, GIMP is worth the price :-)

[bumfluff]

Ok, but would you put that on your business card?

[lin robinson]

Not unless I was trying to impersonate Brian. :-)

Like he said, Web2. another touch would change background color, by the way. Or get rid of shadow or separate the shadow from the words. I have used this effect before, but usually without the bottom, reflecting half.

I forgot until I mentioned it on another thread, but you can do most of these exact same pre-loaded rendering online at cooltext.com

[Shane McManus]

If you are wanting to be professional and portray that, try stay away from PSP.

[monaghan]

Surely it's the result that's important, not what tool you use?

For someone like me who's not arty then having a £800 tool is not going to get me any better results than a GPL tool.

[bumfluff]

Actually, I'd agree with Shane. Should really use a vector-based program for logos 'cos the quality doesn't degrade when resizing/resampling the logo.

[lin robinson]

I just used this technique to create a title logo for a site I'm doing now (using Joomla CMS)
DON"T pay attention to site content...it's a mishmash of placeholders. I just got started.

But I'm talking about the logo. I got rid of the shadows here. I think it looks all right.

The icon to the right was done exactly the same, except using a dingbat character to create the "bullseye". (the clockworks was from a photo, merged in using paint.net)


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