Some of you may not know that, in addition to 3G2S, I have a shopping blog called A Blog of Goodies. This has always been a secondary blog for me and has never really received my full attention even though it is only a few months younger than my primary blog. Every once in awhile, I will have extra time to tweak that blog a little with a small change that makes me love it even more. The latest change has been for me to create an official ABOG logo and I did this using Logo Garden.
Logo Garden offers a free service to help you create a logo. It is great for anyone who does not have a lot of experience in graphic design. You simply choose a symbol, a color, your font and font size, plus any desired advanced effects, such as a shine, shadow, or reflection (I ended up using all three). Overall, the process was user-friendly, except there was a glitch that occurred whenever I had one layer overlapping another completely. Whenever that happened and I tried to click on one of the layers, the program seemed to freeze. It was frustrating because I had to start my design all over again a few times before I figured out that I needed to move some of my layers aside before trying to edit the lower layers.
In the end, for a free service, I was happy with the logo I ultimately created. With this free service, however, you only get a small low resolution .jpeg of your logo. Mine was 222 x 222 pixels. This might be fine if you just want to create a Facebook profile image, use a small version of the logo to print on basic fliers, or to create a small banner, but this cannot be used for high quality printing of any kind or for website designing. In order to receive a high resolution (300dpi) .png with a transparent background and a high resolution .jpeg, you need to upgrade for a $19.99 fee, which seems reasonable considering what it costs to have a professional graphic designer create a logo for you. With the high resolution logo, I was able to create a new header for my blog, change my favicon, make a banner, and create a new Facebook cover.
After you are finished designing your logo, you will be offered the opportunity to design a webpage. Like the logo, this service is free, but will have upgrade options. I did not explore this service because I usually do my own web designing.
Next, you will have the opportunity to create a business card with your new logo on it. There are currently 25 different templates to choose from. The software automatically uses the color you chose for your logo in the card templates.
You can receive 100 business cards for free, but you need to pay the cost of shipping. Again, you have the option to upgrade your cards for a small fee. The quality of printing and the cardstock of the upgraded cards can be seen below. There is no set-up fee for card printing at Logo Garden. I only wish that they offered 2-sided printing because I always feel like the space on the back of business cards is going to waste.
I also want to mention that I received an email solicitation for services to design and manage my website. I do not recall checking a box that gave permission to be contacted, so I was a little surprised to have received this email.
To learn more about creating your own logo, webpage, or business cards, visit www.LogoGarden.com, where you can find a video demonstration.
Thank you to Logo Garden for providing complimentary product samples for us to base this review upon.