Create A Logo
Your website needs a logo. Corporate branding has been shown to be one of the most important factors in your customers' perception your company. Big household names such as Mars or Coca-Cola are recognised across the world - and they understand the importance of identifiable branding.
| INFO: The term 'branding' comes from the way a manufacturer's logo was usually burnt onto product packaging with a branding iron - similar to those used on livestock - ouch! |
The easiest logo to use is your company name written in a fancy font. Once you have a name for your company/website, the simplest way to create a professional looking logo like this is to open up your paint program and follow these steps:
- Open a new blank image - about the size of your screen (or bigger). When the logo's finished, you'll shrink the image to it's final size. This increases the quality of the final image.
- The background color should be the background color of your webpages or white if you're not sure.
- Using your paint program's text tool - write your company logo text as large as you can within this window... Use a font that is clear, looks professional and appropriate to your topic.
Most paint programs allow some options to make text look better. You can always set the color, but also:
- Anti-Alias - this will make the edges smoother. Ensure this is on.
- Outline - put an outline (usually in the background colour) around the text.
- Shadow - put a coloured shadow beneath the text to make it look like it's floating.
- Choose the options you think looks best and apply the text to the page. It will probably take a few goes until you're happy with the result. It can be a good idea to make a note of the settings you used to create the logo - in case you want to modify it later. (TIP: Write them small on the image itself using the text tool.)
- Optionally: Use some of the paint program's filters and effects to enhance your logo still further. The only way to find out what you like is to explore your software and try a few different things.
- Ensure you save your work, and the final logo, somewhere safe. If you save the image as a GIF (.gif) image - you have the option of saving it with a transparent background. This can be useful if you want your logo to 'float' over a background for example.
- Finally: Reduce the size of the logo to it's final size - perhaps 600x100 pixels (max) for a banner that sits at the top of each page. This should have the effect of smoothing everything out and making the logo look really good.
INFO: There are a lot of different image formats available to save your logos etc. in. The best format to save your original work in is GIF. This is because it compresses the data to make the file smaller, but does not degrade the image quality.
JPEG images are commonly used because they can be made very small - but reducing the file size of a .jpg image does decrease the image quality.
Professional photographers use TIF format. There's no quality loss, but the file sizes can be huge!
Some paint programs (i.e. Ultimate Paint) have an 'Image Optimiser' where you can see the effect of applying different image formats to an image... The optimiser will show you the image so you can see the quality, and the file size for any image format. |
You can use this same process to create some great looking graphics by using a graphical font like 'wingdings' (or 'webdings', 'dingbats' etc.). Just follow the steps above, but use your text tool to use a 'wingdings' like font...
Because TTF - True Type Fonts are drawn using vectors, they can be scaled up without loss of quality. The alternative would be bitmap fonts where each character is defined using pixels.
There are lots of great free fonts on the internet, see below for some links.
Create your website logo...
Take your time over each of the steps above. Learn what your paint program can do, and explore the possibilities. If you want to create any additional graphics for your site - you can do this now too.
Finding Graphics Online
There are lots of sites which offer free graphics, fonts or even online logo creation tools. Unfortunately, not many of the clipart sites are that good. Beyond the creation of a company logo, all other graphics is simply 'icing on the cake', but the odd image here and there can lift a webpage - and as we all know - an image is worth a thousand words, so...
A good clip-art collection can be invaluable and these can be bought or are sometimes given away on magazine CDs. Free Online clipart sites can be difficult to use, and a bit lacking in content. 100000FreeCliparts.com is an exception to this rule, oddly named, but has almost 100,000 items of free clipart and an easy-to-use interface.
If you want to find a good commercial source of clip art (it can save a lot of time!) then Clipart.com. comes highly regarded. They have 5,860 FONTS, and 2.5 million Clipart images, plus animations, sounds etc...
Resources
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