How to Create a Logo for Your Website
Most websites have some form of logo, which helps to clearly identify or brand the site, thereby improving the chances of visitors remembering your site and returning to it. If you want to add a logo to your web pages, you have 3 basic options: hire a designer to create one for you, create one from scratch yourself, or buy and customize a ready-made logo to meet your specific needs.
Using a Designer
If you decide to hire a designer, there are many available, so you'll have plenty of choice. Make sure that you see samples of their previous work, and understand exactly what you're getting for your money. For example, many of them will give you a few designs from which to choose the one you like, but what happens if you don't like any of them?
You should also make sure that you get the original artwork (i.e. the original files from Adobe Illustrator or whichever tool they're using), not just images in JPEG or GIF format. There are two reasons for this – firstly because you'll need these files if you want to make changes in future, and secondly because if you want to enlarge your logo to go on a poster or something like that, the quality will degrade significantly if you just try to blow up the JPEG or GIF images.
Creating Your Own Logo
A professional designer would use an application like Adobe Illustrator, but it's very expensive. If you just want to combine simple geometric shapes and text in a variety of colors, then you can do a good job with OpenOffice Draw, part of the OpenOffice suite of tools which you can download free from http://www.openoffice.org/. When you've created your design, you can use the Export option on the File menu to save it to a variety of formats, including GIF and JPEG.
If you need a more sophisticated drawing package, then you can use the free GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) tool, which has more advanced editing features. This can be downloaded from http://www.gimp.org/. It takes a while to learn to use GIMP, and we didn't always find it intuitive, but if you stick at it you'll find that it's a very powerful image editing tool.
There are applications you can purchase which are designed specifically for creating logos. These are generally straightforward image editing applications with large collections of templates and clip art. We haven't used any of these so we can't make a recommendations.
Buying and Customizing a Logo
There are many sites which offer ready-made logos that you can purchase and customize. Usually this means that you purchase the image files which can be read and modified in Adobe Photoshop, GIMP or similar programs.
A site we recommend is LogoMaker. This provides a simple graphical interface which allows you to select a logo design, add text to it and modify the colors of both the logo and text, all without needing to use any image editing software.
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