Web 2.0 logos with PaintShopPro

At around £50 PaintShopPro is a simple and accessible graphics program.

I had thought until recently that you’d need buy Photoshop (CS3 retails at over £500) to create Web 2.0 effects.

However, I had a little play with PSP and found you can easily create Web 2.0 style logos with just PaintShop Pro. :)

Here’s how:

1. Create text

File > New

to create a new area to work with, then use the text tool to stick some text on it.

In this instance, I’m going to write “ibrian” in a near-black shade, like this:

Done?

Good - it should now look like this:

2. Create reflective text

Now we’re going to create the text to reflect the original text.

To do this, we’re going to use the text tool again, but this time, select a gradient for the text colour.

More importantly, we’re going to select a lighter shade of grey, to suggest the reflection, and because we’re dealing with a simple example on a white background, we’ll make most of the gradient white, as so:

3. Flip the text

Now we’re going to do nothing more complicated than flip the text:

Image > Flip

You now have an upside image, so just align it with your original text, until you end up with something like this:

And there you have it - voila! A simple and effective way to create Web 2.0 style logos with a cheap graphics package like PaintShopPro. :)

NOTE: Because we’re flipping text, it becomes awkward when dealing with characters with dragging characters, such as g, y, etc, because as we’re using a reflection, these won’t align properly.

No problem - just use upper-case characters, and it’s no longer a problem, as I’ve done here with one of my newer sites: Banking Times.

Simply done. :)