Professional Logos With Gimp? Is That Possible?

I did Photoshop for a long time and went to Gimp just to try it. For simple cut and paste, crop, flatten, resizing, rotation and other basic functions is fine but I didn't find much functions related to 3D, perspective effects in it.

Maybe I didn't try enough.

Regards

David

I agree, Illustrator would be a better choice when it comes to actually creating logos. PS and Gimp can be used for basic stuff, but you are limited.

You can design logos with photoshop using paths...........or shapes

This. I think it's worth hiring a designer for a logo as opposed to using GIMP or indeed you own design skills. The identity means a lot for a web based business, it's worth getting it right.

Actually yes, I guess as others have pointed out above, many designers actually use illustrator for much of there design work as well as other tools from the Adobe Creative Suite. That is of course if they can afford it.

Personally I find Xara Designer Pro a more affordable alternative plus I use a couple of other Adobe tools where Designer Pro doesn't suit my needs.

Like ShaneGorry said above, computer programs are just a tool. Before you worry about the program, use a piece of paper and a pencil and sketch out your ideas. When you get an idea that you like, refine it until it's almost "polished" Then you can decide what program to use to get the logo that you want. Then, scan in your sketch (or take a digital photo of it) and clean it up by redrawing it and coloring it in.

Yeah, I meant to say this also. You should be using a vector program for logo creation the majority of the time. No sense in locking yourself into a specific resolution for osmething you'll need to replicate in different situations.

Amen to that. A true professional would create a professional logo with a piece of coal on a packaging paper, while an amateur can use the very best tools available and still accomplish nothing at all.

Imagine you designed a logo for your website in Gimp or Photoshop. Let's say it's 300 pixels wide by 150 pixels high. It looks nice on your website.

Now, you grow your business and you decide you want some business cards. If you only want your logo 1/2" high, it'll look fine. Might even look good at 1" high.

Now, say you want letterhead, and you want the logo 1.5" high. It might look okay, or it might begin to look a little less crisp and more bitmappy.

Now let's imagine you want a sign for your building or a magnetic sign for your car, and you want the logo 12" high, well, it's going to start to look really bad.

Now, imagine you want a billboard. Your logo will look like garbage.

When you take a bitmap or raster image and blow it up, you lose resolution. What might have been a dot that was 1 pixel will become a square that grows larger and more noticeable the more you increase its size. As such, curves will be less curvy and more like a series of blocks stepping on top of each other. It's just going to look worse the more you enlarge it.

You can, of course, minimize that by making your original bitmap image really really HUGE and then most instances where you use it, you make it smaller instead of bigger. When you make things smaller, you won't be losing resolution as you would when enlarging.

So, that's the problem with creating stuff in Photoshop or Gimp. They are best used for photographic images and not so much for full design, although the newer versions of Photoshop keep adding more and more vector capabilities. Don't know about Gimp.

So, if you create a nice logo in Photoshop and then later need it larger, you're probably going to end up having to recreate it or settle for it looking bad.

With vector art, such as what Illustrator can create, you avoid that. When you create a logo using vectors, you are basically defining that logo in mathematical terms instead of pixels. So, if I design something that's 3 inches by 1 inch high as vector art, I can blow that up to 300 inches by 100 inches without any loss of resolution, because the image is not defined as a series of pixels but as mathematically defined curves and angles and such.

So, I can take that vector art and I can export it to a web graphic or I can print it on my printer or I can send it to a print shop or I can send it to a sign shop, and no matter what size I have it made, it's going to come out looking good without any additional work on my part.

On the other hand, if you try that with a bitmap or raster image, you're going to have a tough time if the original art you created is smaller than what you later need to use it for. You'll probably end up doing a lot of tweaking or recreation that could have been avoided by using vector art to begin with.

Before you decide what tools you need, you first need to decide on what you want to do with your logo, then you need someone with artistic skill to produce it.

There's a big difference between a raster logo and a vector logo and there are different skills, different levels of skill and entirely different software packages for each each with their own unique tools.

The industry standard for professional (vector) logo design is Adobe Illustrator and has been for quite some time.

Professional logo designers would not touch GIMP with a bargepole even for raster output.