Ah, if only it were that easy…
Seen around the toobz - How to Create a Logo for Your Small Business or Website on - WikiHow. And I quoth -
1) - On a piece of notebook paper, make a rough sketch of your logo.
2) - On a white sheet of computer paper, use a fine-point black permanent marker to re-draw your logo on one side. If you have no large shaded regions, skip the next step.
3) - Flip the paper over. On this side, you will notice that the shaded regions have bled through.
4) - Re-color those shaded regions on this side, to give the logo design an even shade. Flip the paper over.
5) - Using ONLY colored pencils (erasable works best), color in the areas that need color. When done, go over the color areas again with the colored pencils. If you don’t have a flatbed scanner, skip the next step.
6) - Take another sheet of computer paper and place it under your logo, to prevent any shadowing when scanning.
7) - Place the logo in the scanner. If you have a flatbed, place it face-down.
Scan. If you don’t need to scan it again before saving the image, skip the next step.
8) - In your scanning software, create a bound box around your logo with a 1/2 inch (12 millimeter) size and save the image. This will cut your image down to a size that includes only the logo.
9) - Edit your logo in any photo editing software, as needed. Apply the logo to whatever you have in mind.
Not to be a wag, but there’s so much wrong with this how-to that I don’t even know where to start. (colored pencils???) But in a similar ’spirit’ - here’s my suggestion for do-it-yourself dentistry -
1) - buy tools
2) - find cavities
3) - fix teeth.
See, anyone can play.
Sorta reminds me of the Underwear Gnomes episode of South Park - where the gnomes have a great plan for global domination, involving stolen underwear. Trouble is, they were missing the one important ingredient - the ‘how’.
The Underpants Gnomes have a three-phase business plan, consisting of:
1) - Collect Underpants
2) - ???
3) - Profit!
None of the gnomes actually know what the second phase is, and all of them assume that someone else within the organization does
The ‘???’ phase of this how-to is ‘make a sketch of your logo’. That one simple step is the reason tens of thousands of designers go to art school and colleges and spend a lifetime honing their skills and talents. They go on to suggest that you scan this logo into a photo paint program, edit to your hearts content, and apply to everything you want. Sure, if you want an RGB low-rez bit-mapped image that always has a bounding box (filled background) and can’t be printed as a spot-color logo on business cards and the like. This is added to the how-to as an after thought (without mentioning that Adobe Illustrator costs around $600 and has a rather steep learning curve) -
Try to use vector based programs (such as Adobe Illustrator), rater than pixel based programs to do you logo. This is because, with the pixel program (such as paint), if you are to change the sizes of your logo, then it is going to produce the “blurring effect”. Furthermore, this is what the professionals use, and would prefer to receive the logo artwork in this file format.
So there you have it. Who needs to hire professionals when all it takes is to sketch your idea, scan it, and then edit the artwork with either a crappy paint program (that will render your logo unusable for almost every application) or one of the most sophisticated (and difficult to master) design software programs around.
Of course, if you follow the links in the article you’ll find that the real purpose is to send logo design search engine love to do-it-yourself ‘logo design’ generators which as we all know - is a totally ineffectual way to develop any professional identity (and against their own advice, bypasses the ’sketch’ phase with a whole mess of logo design templates).
Apparently, the devil is always in the details.
