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Whether it’s a simple one-page site or a far-reading blog, every website can benefit from a beautifully designed logo. Take a look at any great website and the first thing you’ll notice is that most of these are deceptively simple. While they might be basic on the surface, there’s far more thought and hidden meaning going into logo design than you might think. It’s that thought and hidden meaning that means some companies and websites will pay thousands, if not millions, for their logo design. Luckily for you, if you’ve got a copy of Pixelmator (it’s available for free with every print copy of our latest issue – 122 – don’t you know), you needn’t fork out all that cash. Simply follow our step-by-step guide below and you’ll have yourself an amazing website logo in no time at all.
Step 1: Create your canvas
Fire up Pixelmator and create a new document. When designing for web, you needn’t worry about making your images too large, particularly when it comes to resolution, which can be left at 72ppi.
Step 2: Text is best
Unless you want to rely on a simple mark alone, basing your logo around some text is a good idea. Use Pixelmator’s Text tool to type out your site’s name and select an interesting font.
Step 3: Make your mark
To create a simple mark for the logo, we created a new layer and used the circular selection tool to create some coloured circles. Each of these had a low opacity and overlapped.
Step 4: Scrap the background
Having a transparent background gives you a little more flexibility when it comes to placing your logo on your website. To achieve this, simply turn off the background layer and save as a PNG.
Step 5: Come a cropper
In order to help reduce that all-important image size, it’s best to crop your finished logo down to the first pixel on each side. Most apps, including Pixelmator, should snap to these.
Step 6: Export for Web
As we mentioned earlier, using Pixelmator’s Export for Web tool is an essential final step here. You’ll find it in the Share menu – be sure to keep an eye on file size and enable transparency.
