The Logo Creator - 5.1

If you are a video game designer, and you need to populate the internal world of your game with numerous plausible but non-existant companies, this is quite a convenient way of doing it. In a few seconds per logo, you can create a string of virtual companies which look like you spent many minutes in Photoshop on them.

Unfortunately, that's more or less where this program finishes. I tried out the earlier version, but, looking at the samples on the website, the fundamental problem has not been solved. Basically, this appears to be because the software creators do not understand what a logo actually is.

The fundamental criteria for good logo design are:
i) Identifiability (you see it again, you recognise it)
ii) Uniqueness (within your target market)
iii) Reproduceability (in CMYK, spot Pantone colour, black and white,)
iv) Representation (of your corporate style -- not a picture of what you do)
v) Simplicity (it's a brand, not an illustration)

Unfortunately, although this program produces things which look plausible, it fails to satisfy any of these criteria. There's a distressing similarity between all the logos on the samples pages of the developer's website, and this was also my experience using the software. This makes them not unique, and, therefore, hard to identify when you see them again. What's rather worse, the application produces logos which look good on a computer screen, but reproduce poorly in commercial CMYK print, do not render well into black and white, and offer no support for Pantone spot colour. Much corporate print is now CMYK, of course, but most merchandising — pens, mugs, promotional T-shirts, etc — uses just one or two colours. Whether the logos represent your corporate style is, of course, up to you, but unless your style is fussy and hyped up, its unlikely that this has anything for you. Finally, this application produces hideously complex logos.

If you look around at really classic logos, such as IBM, Apple, Nestle, Cadbury, BBC, etc, you see a common theme of simplicity. Apple is actually a case in point — the original multi-coloured Apple logo proved ruinously expensive, which is why, even on your computer screen, the Apple is now one colour.

This is a technically good piece of software which, regrettably, is likely to lead a lot of people into very poor design. It's advantage is that, in a few minutes, it can produce the kind of glossy but non-functional emblem which would take a non-designer hours to achieve in Photoshop.

Except that a designer wouldn't use Photoshop. Logos are almost always designed in a vector program, of which Illustrator is the most common.

Bottom line: if you want a logo, hire a designer.

Actually, I am glad I bought this piece of crap. Now I know the bottom exteme of hype-over-performance. No Thanks. Even the decal that comes with the disc sucks.