Need help making simple logo/banner

[Hobbyist]

Hi

I'm pretty clueless regarding logos and banners. Does anyone have any tips
on how I should go about making a simple
yet distinctive one for my website?

If there is any free software that can do it, I would love to hear about it..

Thanks

[click watcher]

try ulead photoimpact, it has a load of banner templates that you can easily use.

the program is not free but is available for 30 days trial.

also xara webstyle is a similiar but cheaper template driven banner builder, again available for 30 days trial

[bufferzone]

For any kind of graphic, Photoshop is the way to go, but it's not free. Paint shop Pro is sharware and pretty good (search for psp and you will find a lot of download sites) If you want an animated banner try swish (downloadable at swishzone.com), not free but cheap

[Marcia]

Photoshop is great, and I found it easier to catch on to than Paint Shop Pro for some reason, but most people find the opposite. PSP is much cheaper and there are loads of simple tutorials out there. It's also got a lot of features now that make things very simple for beginners, like buttonizing nav buttons or banners. It comes with an animation program, and there are sometimes rebates available. Best thing to do is go right to the jasc.com site and download a trial, then look for a rebate to buy - or get the boxed version if it's currently coming with a book thrown in free. The trial is 30 days, but used to last for 60. It probably still does.

A nice little free program (that runs ads to support it) is 2020 [hotfreeware.com], which does screen captures, resizes and converts file formats, and does a fair bit with creating and editing images for being cost-free.

There are a lot of free programs out there, I imagine there must be some listed at ODP.

[mivox]

The absolute easiest way to make a "logo" is to choose a specific type face (font) and color to print your company name in, and consistently use that typestyle for your company name, whenever you use it. This provides an easy way to make do-it-yourself business stationery in almost any word processing program, for letterhead, envelopes, business cards, etc.

For banners and graphic logos, look at a bunch of different companies' websites, and commercial ad banners and make notes about the ones that catch your eye... Why do you like them, what got your attention, would you actually click on the banner, etc. Once you have a good idea of what kind of look you're going for, almost any free/shareware graphics program would allow you to actually create the graphic.