Imagine creating a logo for your business, website, or team with just a name, icon, and slogan. There's no need to buy and learn Photoshop or CorelDraw; for a little more than $40 and an hour of time you'll have a pretty good-looking logo. That's the idea behind Logo Design Studio (LDS) and, for the most part, the idea really works.
Every so often, I get it in my head that I need to carve out some time to really learn Photoshop. Among other uses, I want to be able to create logos for various endeavors. Now that I have Logo Design Studio Pro, I can procrastinate a bit longer on learning Photoshop. The software is far from perfect, but I was certainly able to create some logos for projects at work and my website, so overall it's been a success.
When you first install LDS, you are prompted for a Windows XP or Vista install. That made me think, "Cool, they support Vista" as well as, "Yikes! don't they know how to detect what operating system I'm running?" My main workstation runs Windows Vista 32-bit, so I did most of the testing on that machine.
To get started, a wizard will present you with a library of templates to pick from.
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They are categorized but there is no search, so you need to spend a few minutes browsing through what is available.
After you choose a template you can begin to work on the logo. The obvious first step is to replace the text with your own. Just select the text and use the entry box on the right to put in your own.
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Next you can add a tagline somewhere on the logo. If you can't think of one, LDS will suggest some for you:
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Finally, you can either keep the graphic portion of the logo, modify it, or even replace it with one of your own design. The software comes with basic vector drawing tools as well as a large selection of pre-built objects to insert and modify.
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LDS comes with four basic effects: drop shadows, emboss, frame, and blur. You can select any element in the logo and apply an effect. Probably the most advanced feature in the product, and one you don't really have to worry about with simple logos, is layers. The layers act like those in Photoshop. Instead of treating the image as a single two-dimensional image, layers allow you to sandwich together a series of images. This comes in handy when you want to modify or apply effects like drop shadows to a text layer but not disturb a graphic layer.
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The lock and eye icons allow you to keep a layer from accidentally being modified and allow you to selectively turn on and off layers as you make your edits. If you're a Photoshop veteran, layers will be easy. If you're not, don't worry about it, or use it as an opportunity to learn how to work with layers.
Once you have the logo how you want it, you can export it for print use, online use, or grayscale. The print options like PDF and TIFF were high quality and looked great on my inkjet. The online use gives you basic JPG images at preset sizes. The grayscale option would be for business cards and fax documents. On the JPG images I would have liked a little stronger antialiasing on the fonts, but that's being quite picky.
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