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Design Your Own Logo.
by CJ Hughes
If you have been looking for a logo designer on the internet recently you have learned one thing fast, they are expensive. Some logo designers online charge as much as $1000.00 for a logo. Then on top of the high fees they limit the number of colors, mockups or revisions that you can have. There are a few alternatives. One is to visit one of the graphic design bid websites online. You post your graphic design project
for free and then logo designers bid on the project. They offer a price, give a description of their services, and in some cases they even upload examples of their past logo designs. Some of them will even provide you with free logo design mockups if you have provided enough information about the type of logo you are looking for.
While there are logo design programs out there that call themselves logo makers, free logo makers or logo creators, these are normally nothing more than text editors with clipart built in, these should be avoided.
Designing your own logo can be a tricky process. It can also be fun however, and may lead to profit! How many times have you built or made something and shown it to someone, then you had to make another one for them? This can happen with design as well. Say you design a logo for a bowling league you are a member of, or your church or basketball team. Everyone that sees it will want to know who designed it.
The first step in designing your own logo is the business, event or group name. Also decide if there will be a catch phrase or slogan to be worked into the logo. Will you use a mascot? If so, research the type of mascot you want to use on the Internet. Google has a great image search; if you want a badger in your logo go to google and type badger into the image search. This will give you tons of images to use as reference for your logo. You will also need fonts. If you don't have some unique fonts on your computer then you can try sites like acidfonts.com for some great freeware or shareware fonts. The most important thing to have however is a great graphics program. Avoid using Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher. Your need a vector based graphics program. What is "vector?" Vector based means that the image can be increased in size, up to billboard size and larger, without loosing its resolution. This is important when your logo will be used on many different applications from screen-printed shirts, to pens, stationary and promotional products. I use and recommend XARA X, and affordable vector graphics program available at xara.com Another more expensive route would be Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Freehand. I personally find Xara X very easy to use. And when your done with your logo you can export it as an Adobe Illustrator file, which is the industry standard for universal printing of stationary, screen printing, embriodery and merchandise marketing.
Just remember that if your not an artist by nature, a lot of trial and error will be necessary. If all else fails it's back to the searching for a great logo designer online who will listen to your needs and provide you with great logo design mockups to choose from.
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