With The GIMP, creating rudimentary 3D logos is painless…if you know the steps. And with a good collection of fonts you can make your clients think you have far more skills than you might actually have. With that in mind, let’s take a look and see just how simple it is to create a 3D logo with The GIMP.

How it works

The GIMP has a built in feature that helps you to create these logos. We will be working with version 2.6 – which is actually important because the engine that creates these has changed as well as the location of the submenu has changed. So if you don’t have 2.6, give upgrading a go.

The process is pretty simple.

• Select the type of logo you want to create from the Create menu.
• Enter all of the necessary information and select the configurations to suit your needs.
• Click OK
• Edit the image to suit your needs.
• Save the file.

Now let’s take a look at the process with a bit more detail.

The logo tool

Figure 1

To open up the logo tool go to the File menu and select the Create submenu. From with the Create submenu you will see the Logos submenu, click on that to reveal the different types of logos you can create (see Figure 1).

The different types of logos range from the cartoonish, to the professional, to the nearly-fantastical. There are quite a few choices so your best bet is to play around with them until you find the type of logo you prefer to work with.

Figure 2

Once you click on the logo type you want to create a new window will open. It is within this window that the logo is created. The good news is, you really need zero artistic skills to tackle this task.

Figure 2 shows all of the configuration options you will have to deal with to create a logo. Don’t let amount of options fool you, you really only need to work with a minimum of these to create your logo. Here’s what you’ll need to work with:

Text: This is what your logo will say.

Font: This is the font you want to use for your logo.

Blend Gradient(s): These will be the gradient colors you will use for your logo. You can create new gradients as well. The included gradients should be plenty to get you started.

Background Color: If you know the color of the background your logo will be going over you can change this here. I usually delete the background color so the logo is surrounded by a transparent border.

Figure 3

And that is the bare minimum you need. Once you have all of that filled out, click OK and the logo will be created.

Figure 3 shows a sample logo created using the Glossy logo tool, the Biometric Joe font,  and the Cold Steel 2 gradient.

Of course there are plenty more options to configure for your logo – but getting the hang of the basics will give you plenty to do with this tool.

Figure 4

TIP: As I mentioned I tend to remove the background in this logos. What this does is allow my logos to be placed on any color background. To do this go to the layer window of your new logo, select the background layer, and click the delete button in the layer window. When you save this image you will now want to make sure you save it in a format that supports transparency (such as .gif or .png.)

Final thoughts

I have used this method to create logos for plenty of clients. Not only does this make you a more versatile web designer, it also adds to the bottom line as you can now charge design fees.

Related posts

• Use Agave to create color schemes (1)
• 9 high quality free fonts (3)
• Yoggie PICO Personal Mobile Security Computer (3)
• With Ubuntu 9.10 Arrives Wubi 9.10 (2)
• Widgets for Linux: SuperKaramba (6)

So instead, I gave Paint.net another go, an application which I have tried before, but gave up because I heard GIMP was so awesome. Paint.net is a graphical application just like Photoshop, but without many of its fancy tools. If you just need some cropping, resizing and positioning action for images in your blog, Paint.net will be great. At around 6Mb in size, it doesn’t take a toll on your system either.

For me it works quite well for basic web design too, simple gradients, some web 2.0 style reflections, nothing too complex. The two things which I miss most about Photoshop though is the text capabilities and vector graphics. Text capabilities in both GIMP and Pain.net are shabby compared to PS, and Paint.net doesn’t really have great pen tools either. If you need way more power than the simple Windows Paint, but way less than Photoshop, Paint.net is a solid, well built, lightweight image editor for you.

Related posts

• Adobe Photoshop PSD Plugin For Paint.net (4)
• Photoshop MultiTouch Image Editing (11)
• Photoshop “skin” for Gimp (5)
• Paint.net 3.5 Final (13)
• Paint.Net 3.5 Beta (6)

You can get the best of both worlds though with a nifty addon to Gimp called Gimpshop. This reorders your menus and restructures them to resemble Photoshop’s, and very closely at that. Many items that have caused mix-ups have been changed, for example Gimp’s convolve tool has been renamed to “blur/sharpen”, something actually understandable.

Menus have been reordered to, so if you’ve grown accustomed to Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home in Gimp too. I’m sorry to say there is no Windows version yet, only Mac and Linux, but there is one on the way! If you’re a developer you can grab the source from the homepage though. I like many-many things in Gimp and I’d rather support free software which is as good as its $600 counterpart, so it’s Gimp with Gimpshop for me!

Related posts

• Tired of Photoshop and GIMP? Try Paint.net (14)
• Photoshop MultiTouch Image Editing (11)
• Photo Filter Software (3)
• Photo Editing Software Image Tuner (9)
• Liquid Rescale plugin for Gimp (4)

Before I give Noah’s method, I’d like to mention that there is a way to create animated gifs directly with MPlayer. However, the resultant gif file can sometimes be very strange-looking so it’s not very reliable. Anyway, once you figure out what video clip to use, let’s begin. Fire up MPlayer and switch to command-line operation. Then type in the following command:

mplayer -ao null -loop 0 -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi

This command allows you to preview what your final gif will look like. In this instance, I’ve selected a 5 second clip and looped it so it keeps repeating. If you’re satisfied with the clip, proceed to the next step.

mplayer -ao null -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi -vo jpeg:outdir=gifmovie

This command tells MPlayer to export your 5-second clip as a series of jpeg images to the specified folder, which in this case is ‘gifmovie’. After this step, MPlayer’s work is done and it’s time to switch to Gimp. This is where you convert the jpeg files into your gif.

Open the first jpeg image in your directory using Gimp. Then, open the rest of the images in the folder as layers (File > Open as layer). Now, all you have to do is save the file as a gif (File > Save As). In the resultant dialog box, check the ‘save as animation’ and ‘loop forever’ options. Then, click on ‘Export’ and your animated gif is ready.

You need to play around a bit with the options in Gimp if you want to add fancy effects and things like that. I tried this out and I was quite happy with my gif file. It requires a bit of practice but once you have a basic idea of where things are, it’s a breeze. Have you ever tried making an animated gif file? What program did you use? What do you think of Noah’s method?

Related posts

• Use MPUI as a Portable Media Player (2)
• Tired of Photoshop and GIMP? Try Paint.net (14)
• SMPlayer Uncommon Codecs Package (3)
• SMPlayer Portable (16)
• SMPlayer 0.6.7 out (17)

Liquid Rescale is a plugin for Gimp which adds this functionality to Gimp. I was a little bit surprised that it took just a few weeks to create the plugin which currently does everything shown in the tech demo except real-time resizing.

The Liquid Rescale plugin requires Gimp 2.1.1.3 or newer and can be found in the Layer menu after installation. Take a look at the technology demonstration below in case you missed it. The plugin itself is available for Linux and Windows.

Read More:

Liquid Rescale
via Genbeta

Related posts

• XnView Add-ons and Format Plugins (1)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery (8)
• We Heart It (1)
• Wallpapers again (2)
• Twins Visions Image Management (3)

The tool is available for many platforms including Windows, Mac and Unix / Linux. The best part is, that it has almost every feature that Adobe Photoshop has. Its able to load and save in 34 different formats making it also an ideal image converter.

The homepage has not only download links to the latest GIMP version but also an extensive tutorial section that helps you in your first steps with GIMP.

I recommend the tool to everyone who needs to use an image manipulation program for his personal images and websites.

Head over to the Gimp Homepage and take a look at it.

Related posts

• Twins Visions Image Management (3)
• Create edit and upload Screenshots with SHUP (4)
• Zip Repair (3)
• Zen Key An All Purpose Application Manager (3)
• Youtube Batch Downloader (13)