Wanted: One Graphic Artist

[Valerian]

I'm absolutely, positively not a graphic artist myself -- or indeed any kind of artist -- but I have to pretend to be one at work.  What I'm trying to do is set up little monthly logos for the newsletter of upcoming books that we send out to our stores.  It's just a little four-page thing, but it's popular among the employees and the regular customers, and I want it to look decent.

The upper left corner, a space a little less than two and a half inches square, needs to contain the name of our stores and the month and year.  I use Publisher, so I play with the Word Art features and such, plus border art and clip art, to try to make something halfway professional looking.

Trouble is, I can picture good ideas and arrangements, but my execution of said ideas is... a little lacking.  For one thing, I lack certain tools that would probably be a huge amount of help, seeing as my boss is too cheap to buy anything like Photoshop.  A second problem is that he won't spring for printing these things in color, only on colored paper.

So could anyone give me any hints as to the technical aspects?  Point me to a useful website, perhaps, that offers up advice and assistance to the artistically challenged?  My repertoire right now is pretty limited, and I'm tired of the same old look to these logos, so any suggestions on livening them up would be appreciated.

[Vekseid]

If your boss is too cheap for photoshop, you could try to convince him to get you Paint Shop Pro, which is a fairly decent substitute.

The GIMP has a lot of Photoshop's less advanced feature like layers, etc. though it's not quite as easy to use. It may actually be more powerful than PSP as I haven't used the latest versions of that.

[consortium11]

paint.net is another (very) simple, free version of photo/paintshop, although I believe gimp is probably better.

[Trieste]

And I do have Photoshop, so if you need help from that, I'll be happy to help you. I'm not a whiz at it by any stretch but I'm all right.

[Caeli]

If you're going to be making logos, I actually would recommend Adobe Illustrator, as it works with vectors, as opposed to coordinates. But again, the price thing, so...

I've heard that GIMP, while it is still unwieldy and not comparable to Photoshop, is still pretty good. For simple work like black/white logos, it should really be sufficient. -nods-

[Oniya]

And you can always add texture with thin diagonal lines.  Take a look at the week-day comics in the newspapers for some techniques.

(Having said that, there should be some kind of 'aid to sequential artists' out there...)

[Valerian]

If you're going to be making logos, I actually would recommend Adobe Illustrator, as it works with vectors, as opposed to coordinates. But again, the price thing, so...

I have no idea what the difference is between vectors and coordinates.  Heh.  But thanks much for all the help so far, everyone.   

To start with, I may just try GIMP -- I'll never really need (or have the courage to try) anything truly advanced, and as far as I can tell from the tutorials I'm finding, the basic stuff isn't too bad.  I can't tell if it allows for different fonts and other styles for text, though -- can anyone enlighten me on that?

[Vekseid]

I have no idea what the difference is between vectors and coordinates.  Heh.  But thanks much for all the help so far, everyone.  

To start with, I may just try GIMP -- I'll never really need (or have the courage to try) anything truly advanced, and as far as I can tell from the tutorials I'm finding, the basic stuff isn't too bad.  I can't tell if it allows for different fonts and other styles for text, though -- can anyone enlighten me on that?

...yes, it does, silly :-p

[Valerian]

Hey, I never heard of GIMP before, you know.  Or rather, I'd heard of it, but had no idea what it actually did.  Heh.  I'm mostly stumbling around right now, but I'll catch on eventually.  I hope.

[Vekseid]

Hey, I never heard of GIMP before, you know.  Or rather, I'd heard of it, but had no idea what it actually did.  Heh.  I'm mostly stumbling around right now, but I'll catch on eventually.  I hope.

There are plenty of people you can ping for assistance. Just make sure you specify the kind of gimp on a site like this : )

[Caeli]

xD

The difference between vectors and coordinates. I don't know how it's technically explained, but it means that with coordinates, you're specifying a certain size for your image; with vectors, you're specifying the shape, so that if you decide to resize it larger or smaller, there is no loss in the quality of your image.

I'm fairly certain there are GIMP tutorials on Youtube, though :O or simply google "GIMP tutorials ____" for whatever specific action you want to accomplish. Video tutorials are really great when you want visual, step-by-step instructions for doing things :)

[Trieste]

Valerian, if you want to play around with pretty fonts, I've never had a problem with 1001freefonts dot com.

[Caeli]

http://www.dafont.com/ has a lot of good ones, too

[Valerian]

Ooh, yeah, I need fonts, the prettier the better.  *goes to investigate*  Thanks!