Let's talk about logo and icon design

[jana]

I often go to the Logo of the Day website, both to find inspiration and to laugh over some of the designs :) Because designing a good-looking and meaningful logo is not an easy task, even though it can look deceptively easy on the surface. There is so much to think about, like the message you want to bring across and the kind of emotions you want to evoke in people. It's very similar to designing small desktop or website icons; you want to say as much as possible, but you only have so much space. Very tricky indeed.

So, my question goes to the community: Ever tried your hands on logo or icon design with GIMP? Or is GIMP not the best tool for this kind of creative work? Any thoughts?

Comments

[nebulosity]

I think you can create logos without a problem in GIMP, but I certainly think you'd have to do a lot more manual work in the design (and you might have to be a little more creative in terms of how you actually create the graphic). I haven't tried adobe illustrator, but it sounds like illustrator is made specifically for drawing graphics. I should give illustrator a try and then compare it to GIMP. I've done basic graphic design with gimp before, but not so much logo design.

[jana]

I use Inkscape as a vector graphic program, but I think the program's functionality is very similar to Illustrator. It's just a guess though, since I've never used Illustrator. My experience with Inkscape is that you have more control of the small details of a drawing or an image, but then again, there is lots of amazing stuff out there - made with GIMP - so it shouldn't be impossible to do inspiring logos, or desktop icons. There is one thing though that's lacking in GIMP in my opinion, and that's the program's font functionality. Most of the time fonts in GIMP just don't look very good. It's much easier to do something with fonts in Inkscape.