If you are a Mac user of any sort, then at some point in time it is quite likely that you are going to want to make for yourself a logo, or be asked by someone else to make a logo. How do you go about it if you want to create your own logo? It is not absolutely necessary that you spend hundreds of pounds or dollars to buy the latest Photoshop from Adobe. There are a number of very inexpensive graphics applications that you can use as logo maker software. Applications such as Pixelmator, Vector Designer, Picturesque, Acorn, the free one Gimp or my favourite, Art Text 2.
Less expensive alternatives to photoshop
One of the reasons that you will not necessarily want to buy software like Photoshop is that an application like that is more for the professional, who will be using it on a daily basis. Pixelmator is the alternative to Photoshop that is extremely affordable and you can get it from the Mac App Store. I have tried out Acorn and Picturesque, but Pixelmator 2 is the bitmap graphics app that gets my recommendation. This latest version also has a certain amount of vector graphics functionality, which is helpful but by no means any competition to Illustrator.
Art Text 2 is a specialist logo creator software
The output from Art Text 2 is a bitmap but you can do some really fancy effects with your text within the program while it is still a vector graphic. The ability to do this within Art Text 2, means that when you do export out from Art Text 2 you do get very good quality bitmap images. I do find that Art Text 2 does have an interface that is a little idiosyncratic or strange. When you get used to it though, you will be able to quickly create your own logo. If you want to know how to make a logo, I would suggest that you use this application, especially if you want to end up with a logo that is good looking and of professional quality.
Art Text 2 the best logo design software for the Mac
When you first open the application you get to look in the template gallery. This is a very good way to start your design as you can take any of the parts of the design and change them to suit your own logo. You may choose from a number of templates for headings, buttons, icons and of course logos. You might select a design which has a certain number of shapes or design elements contained within that you can use. You can delete any parts that you don’t want and do some editing with any items that need some work.
A century of headings in the gallery
Many of the 100 templates in the heading section you could easily use as a starting point for your own logo. The large creative variety available within the template for headings give you different sorts of foreground elements in terms of shapes and treatments of text. There are also a number of backgrounds which you could use in this logo creator software. If you jump into this logo maker software not having any idea of the logo that you would like to see, then looking through these templates is certain to stimulate your creativity.
But there is more in Art Text2
When you double click on the text that you have entered within Art Text 2, up pops a layer content editing box. This is where you type in the text that you actually want to use or choose to use a shape instead. You have tabs for shapes, text, icons and access to the Finder. The other tab is called custom, within this custom tab you will see text and shapes that you have customised while using this logo design software. This is where the Art Text 2 gets really interesting, in the bottom right-hand corner you will see an edit button. Click on this edit button and you can edit any shape you have chosen including the shapes that are text. I could for instance take a letter N and choose some of the nodes that make up the shape and pull them in whichever direction I wish. With this it is really easy to change any text and turn it into almost any other shape.
Logo design software layers
With Art Text 2 you do get layers that you can use if you want to have a complicated design. You also get the blending modes when one layer is on top of another, that you would get in an application like Pixelmator 2. You do get some facilities such as union, subtract, intersect and join. These are operations more specific to vector design ways of working. Also within these layer settings, you can also split a word into letters or extract a letter.
There have been a couple of occasions where I have created something in Art Text 2, copied it and pasted it into another application and the sizes have been off. Not too large a problem but I have had to find another way round that workflow. You can export out as a TIFF file, a JPEG, a PNG file, a PDF or a GIF and surprisingly also as an EPS file. I have not tried that yet, but I would expect that to be a vector version of your design.
I wouldn’t use this application for general photo editing or bitmap editing work, but it is a brilliant application to have in my toolbox for editing graphics. When the emphasis is on creating a logo, then Art Text 2 is the best.
