Adobe Photoshop can seem capable of anything. It’s known for photo retouching, but it’s so powerful that it can do digital painting, video editing, web design, and even 3D graphic illustrations. As a result, you may assume that it is possible to design a logo in Photoshop. The reality, however, is much more complicated.
Despite appearances, Photoshop isn’t magic. It can be one of the most widely used graphics programs, from professional photographers and graphic designers to grandmothers retouching family photos. It may have even become one of those rare products used as a verb (any manipulated image is often accused of being “photoshopped”).
As one of the world’s leading graphic design programs, In the marketplace, Photoshop is made for many people with very diverse needs, but there are some projects for which Photoshop is not just an imperfect tool, it’s the worst possible tool. In particular, Photoshop should never be used for logo design. Let’s explore why.
Requirements for a logo design:
Logo design is expected to play a major role in branding, and this tends to require that the logo Be always present in your full potential. points of contact with a company. To this end, a number of standard best practices have been incorporated into the aesthetic and technical requirements for logo design.
First, a logo design must be prepared to work in a seemingly infinite number of contexts. different. Some of these are pretty obvious from the start: a business card, website header, letterhead, t-shirt, etc. of time, and you may need to use your logo on, for example, a moving vehicle or an aerial banner.
All of this means that creative decisions must take into account versatility in logo design. The logo needs to look just as good scaled up to 100 feet tall or shrunk to the dimensions of a postage stamp. This tends to lead to styles that are simplistic in nature. For example, you could design a logo with twenty colors and complex shading, but that detail tends to get lost at small sizes. Plus, printing extra colors can be expensive, which means you could suddenly lose money to a mass order of business cards.
On the technical side, the software that creates the logo must be able to achieve wholesale changes on the fly. Your designer can provide a full color logo, an all black logo, and an all white logo. But let’s say, for example, that your company is participating in a breast cancer charity event and you want to add a pink accent to the logo. Ideally, they shouldn’t have to hire another designer just to change the color.
Similarly, your final logo will be set to a standard size, and you should be able to scale it up or down at will. without any loss in image quality, which you will be able to do with a vector file, but not with a raster image.
See our guide on the differences between vector and raster images >>
What we mean here is that the ideal logo design software should specialize in simplicity and should be capable of versatility. Now let’s take a look at Photoshop and see how well it meets these requirements.
How Photoshop Works:
Adobe Photoshop was originally what it sounded like: a program for working with photos. Most of its tools are designed for photo editing, such as adjusting contrast and brightness, removing blemishes, and combining photos into collages.
Photos are essentially hyper-realistic images, as the cameras capture all the details, lighting and color of the everyday world in digital format. The way a computer represents complex images like this is by simplifying the information through what are called pixels, which are microscopic squares of solid individual colors.
When you zoom in on a photo on a computer, you’ll eventually see it separated into these pixels, and when you zoom out, you’ll see the pixels blend to form a realistic image. Depending on the type of camera, a photo can contain thousands of pixels, since more pixels means more details, in other words, higher quality.
Pixel-based computer graphics are generally called image images. raster, and that makes Photoshop a raster program (as opposed to a vector-based program like Adobe Illustrator).
Learn about the different image file formats here >>
The advantage of working with raster images is that you can achieve great complexity, which is why Photoshop has become the go-to program for any detailed artwork, from video to illustration. All you have to do is add more pixels to increase the level of detail (either color, shading, or texture) using tools like the Brush tool, Healing Brush tool, and Clone Stamp tool.
The disadvantage of working with pixels is that they have a fixed size and location. If you’re drawing a character and want to change its nose, you’ll need to erase those pixels and add new pixels, just like drawing in real life.
Similarly, the only way to increase the size of a raster image is to add more pixels to it. But as you can imagine, adding the right number and color of pixels in the right places in a highly detailed image will essentially be impossible.
Because a computer is a machine, it sees a collection of pixels instead from a photographer. This means that the computer can only guess the color and location of the new pixels when an image is scaled up, and the result of resizing is inevitably a loss of quality. That’s why when a small image is enlarged and blurry, because the pixels don’t blend together correctly, we refer to the image as “pixelated”.
Also, to change the colors of an image , you’d need to change the colors of the corresponding pixels (again, potentially hundreds) and it’s hard to isolate the ones you want to change from the ones you don’t when they’re all mixed together in the same image. Photoshop, of course, has famous tools for isolating and editing pixels, such as masking, but these largely require you to separate those pixels yourself.
In general, Photoshop’s tools give you more control than you. you would normally have when editing complex images like photos, but for simpler images, they make editing unnecessarily complicated. Ultimately, Photoshop is great for fine-tuning photographic media that you expect to stay relatively the same size at all times.
Does Photoshop work for logos? —
The answer is no, Photoshop cannot be used for logos. Let’s review what we’ve discussed so far: Logos generally need to be simple and versatile, and Photoshop is software that creates complex artwork based on a set number of pixels. The two are incompatible at a fundamental level. You could make what looks like a logo in Photoshop, but all it would really be is a painting (in pixels) of a logo. You might as well eat a steak with a spoon if you really tried, but why not just use the right utensils?
When can you use Photoshop for logo design?
At the same time, there are a few steps in the logo design process that Photoshop can be useful for. First, sketch and brainstorm: If you have a graphics tablet and stylus, Photoshop can be a great alternative to pen-and-paper sketching. Unlike in real life, you can move your sketches around and the Ctrl + Z undo function is always great when you’re drawing.
Also, after you’ve created your logo in a vector program, you can bring the File to Photoshop for some finishing touches if that’s what you’re after. As mentioned, Photoshop is great for working with detail, making it the best program for realistic special effects like lighting and texture.
Photoshop can also be great for setting up slideshow versions of logos, either for a client or your own portfolio, such as product mockups.
That being said, both scenarios occur before and after designing your actual logo. So what software will give you a logo file that you can actually use?
Which program should you use to design logos? —
Because logo design must be versatile and relatively simple, vector programs have become the standard software for logo design. While raster programs use numerous pixels combined to create images, vector programs create shapes simply through dots and lines.
These programs make changing the layout much easier since it’s all a matter of adjust the position of the points or the curvature of the line. Vector images are also infinitely scalable with no quality loss for this reason. And since you’re working with entire shapes instead of pixels, changing the color is as easy as selecting a shape and choosing a color from the program’s color picker.
Because there are fewer graphic elements to worry about, the resulting images are intended to be much simpler. While this can be inconvenient if you’re looking for realism in your artwork, for logo design it’s a perfect match.
There are many vector software on the market, but the most popular ones are for the logo design software are Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and the free, open-source program Inkscape.
See our complete guide to logo design software >>
Don’t create a logo on Photoshop; We’ll thank each other later:
Adobe Photoshop can often seem like it can do anything, but it shouldn’t be used for logos. It started as photo editing software and this has led to adjacent image-based disciplines such as video and digital painting. Logo design is a whole different beast.
Logo design is the mark of a brand and comes with great responsibility. To that end, so much creative thought goes into logo design—the color, the shape, the emotions it will evoke—that it would be a great shame to ruin it all over technicalities like the wrong software and the wrong image files. The best software may not guarantee a great logo design, but the wrong software will cause you problems down the road. That’s why to get a logo that really works, you need both the right file type and the right graphic designer.
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