Before we start let’s talk about the concept Branding. This is the collection of technics that can be run to get your target market to choose you over your competition. These technics can be:

• designing a good logo.
• inventing a clever slogan.
• investing in adversising.
• …

Don’t get scared. We are not going too deep in this features. This post deals about the funniest off all those points: design a logo .

Why do you need a logo?

You need an image which can be associated with yourself and your blog just at first sight. Most of the important bloggers have our own ( ) logo. Look at Shoemoney and his Super-Dollar and look at me, I have the Binary Ant:

Now I can put it on my social networks and other services. Did you see my Twitter page? Did you see me on MyblogLog or BlogCatalog on other blogs?. When people know mi logo then is is easy for them to recognize me when they see me on any service.

Let’s try to design a simple one. I use Gimp to make my designs. It is free and very similar to Photoshop, but it can’t make vectorial designs so if you wanna a vectorial logo you’ll need a suite for vectorial design like Adobe Illustrator for example. The problem is that good vectorial suites are not for free.

First of all I must apologize. My Gimp is in Spanish and I can’t find how to change it to English to tell you the correct instructions. I’m goint to translate to English the options I have.

Gimp has three windows:

• Gimp Tools: the one with all tool buttons.
• Image or desigh: with your picture.
• Layers: this shows all the layers you have.

Open Gimp and create a new image: File > New and about 600px x 600px

Delete the layer through the opcion Layer > Delete. Then create a new empty layer, this one will be a transparent one.

With the Eliptical Selection Tool (the one in the green square), and with the Shift key pressed draw a circle. The Shift key must be pressed in order to draw a perfect one. Then fill it with red color. The tool for fill the circle is the one pointed by the red arrow. Now more or less now you have something like this:

Now in the Layers window click with the mouse right button on the layer with the red circle and select Alpha Selection. Go to the Image window and click on Layer > New. Leave size as default and then click on Accept. Now you have another layer and a circle selection in it. Go to the Select menu on the Image window and choose the [Grow] option. Put 10 pixels. Fill this new circle with black color. Finally go to the Layers window and pull down the layer with the black circle under the layer with the red circle. You should have something like this, a red circle with a black border:

Now let’s put something in the red circle. What about an X? On Layers window select the red circle layer. Now on the Gimp Tools window select the Text tool, the one with the big black A. Click on the red circle.Because the red circle is very big (remember 600×600) we need to place a very big X, more or less 560 pixels. The font I used was Bookman Old Style Semi-Bold and my X is a yellow one. Place it on the center of the circle. Then again with the trick of Alpha Selection, now with the Text Layer, let’s give the X a black border. I remind you the steps:

1. Alpha Selection on the Text layer, the one with the X.
2. New Layer, this put your selection on the new layer.
3. Select menu and [Grow] option with 10px. The fill it with black color.
4. Pull this black X under the Text layer with the yellow X.

How are you doing? Here is my picture. Notice that now we have 4 layers: black circle, red circle, black X (this is not text, is a color filled selection) and the text layer with the X:

It could be our logo, couldn’t it? So we could leave here, but let’s make more like a web 2.0 image

For the following steps we have to combine the Text layer, the black X layer and the red circle layer all in the same one, so starting from the layer on top (the Text layer) combine it with the one below. At the end you must have 2 layers: the one with red circle and the yellow X, and the one with the black.

Go to the Layers window and with a right click on the red circle layer make and Alpha Selection. Now we have all the red circle selected. Then select the Eliptic Selection Tool from the Gimp Tools window and draw an elipse, this time with the Ctrl key pressed. This way we can draw an elipse bigger than the red circle. We want to select only an slice of the red circle, the slice between the red circle Alpha Selection and the new elipse we are drawing. Look at the picture to see what I mean:

Now that we have this selection we can modify the color properties. In the Image window go to Tools > Color Tools > Brightness and Contrast. Change Brightness to the max value, 127. Do you see the effect? It is really cool, isn’t it? This is the result, your amazing logo

This is all. This was an easy design, you can complicate it whatever you want. The more complication probably the more impact it could cause.

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