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Crafty_Arts.Logos
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Crafty_Arts.Logos
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1996-01-22
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8KB
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175 lines
CRAFTY ARTS: LOGOS AND ICONS
Of Amiga, PC and Helpers
by
Leigh Murray
INTRODUCTION
One of the interesting uses I've made of my Amiga has been to design the
logo for the local PCUG - the user group for users of IBM PC's.
How it began - the germination of an idea!
It all came about because the ACT PCUG had a competition for the design of
a new logo for the group. Now I do like competitions, but for ages, I
didn't notice the write-up about it. In fact, I totally missed the first
mention of the competition in the newsletter (despite it being fairly
prominent). But they extended the deadline for entries, and there was
another big write-up 2 months later. And this time I did notice it, a mere
two days before the entry had to be posted.
Well, I figured that if they were extending the deadline, perhaps they'd
not been inundated with wonderful entries, and I might be in with a chance
if I could only come up with something pronto. Very pronto.
I scrabbled around in my tiny mind, and eventually I remembered a TAD icon
I had designed. It accompanied various MegaDisc articles I wrote about the
TAD disks (which are disks I made to support Technical Aid to Disabled).
The icon depicted a person sitting in a wheelchair at a computer
keyboard/monitor. I wondered if I could snitch something from that icon,
tart it up, and use that as the basis for the PCUG logo. (Designing lots
of icons for MegaDisc has given me excellent experience in developing ideas
from pictures and icons, to incorporate in other icons.) That's what I
did.
THE PROCESS
Icon To Image
I started by loading the icon into IE (the icon editor I use) and
converting it to an IFF via the Export IFF feature. This, and Import IFF,
are useful features (often available in icon editors) for converting
between icon images and IFFs (which are the images normally used by paint
programs).
Resizing
I then resized the image in DPaint (by picking it up as a brush and
enlarging that brush - my memory is hazy now because this all took place
last year, but I think I used the Double Size, perhaps twice).
Trim Off The Excess
The next stage was to trim off excess parts of the image - particularly the
wheelchair, which was definitely not needed for the logo. I was left with
a figure - sitting on nothing - seated at a keyboard/monitor. I further
simplified this image to make it look a bit more striking, and this became
the basis for my logo design.
Add Words
The ACT PCUG has a motto of Users Helping Users (which seems to me to be
exactly what MegaDisc is all about), and they wanted this motto to be
incorporated into the logo. They also wanted PCUG lettering to feature
strongly, and ACT lettering, and they wanted something to indicate visually
that it was the ACT group.
Being fond of the Broadway font - the one I usually use for the large
lettering on the MegaDisc main icons - I decided to use that for PCUG. I
typed the letters, then picked them up as brushes and enlarged them. I
then had to tidy up the pixels until the lettering looked "right". I also
used Broadway, much reduced in size, as the font for the ACT lettering.
For the Users Helping Users part of the logo, I couldn't find any fonts
that I liked among my Amiga fonts, so I swapped to the IBM PC, and
selected a font there for the lettering, saving the image in PCX format.
THE CONVERSIONS
So, by now, I had IFF images on the Amiga, and a PCX image on the IBM, and
I needed to get the two together. For this, I used FBM, which I got from
Fish 677. This is a large suite of programs, with barely adequate
documentation. Eventually it was deduced that all I needed to use was the
fbcat program, using either -Z to convert an IFF to PCX, or -I to convert
from PCX to IFF.
The FBM conversion is fine for 2 colour black and white (I haven't
converted any colour pictures with it). But I was initially "caught" by
the swapping of colour zero (the first colour in the picture's palette) and
colour 1 (the second colour). This meant that black became white and vice
versa, so that I ended up with a negative of the image. So I simply made a
negative first and then used FBM, ending up with a positive, converted
image.
THE ENTRY
Concocting an entry for the logo competition in minimal time proved quite
tricky. When I design the big MegaDisc icons, I generally do a bit of
work on the latest idea, let it gurgle for a day or two, work on it again,
gurgle again, and so on. Not having any experience or training in design,
it seems to take me some time to see the more obvious flaws. And time was
just what I didn't have for this logo competition.
So what I did was to submit 6 ideas (they were happy to accept either ideas
or finished logos). All of the ideas were variations on the theme of a
stylised figure in front of a computer screen, with various forms of
helpers nearby. None of the variations felt quite right to me, and I
didn't have enough time available before the competition closed to begin to
work out what I didn't like about any of them.
I reduced all 6 images to fit on to one screen image (a Hi-Res Interlace
screen for maximum clarity), saved it as an IFF, and printed it on the
inkjet printer I have attached to my Amiga.
I sent in the entry with a day to spare. And I crossed my fingers and toes
for good luck!
THE RESULT
Well, I won the competition, winning a good software package for my
trouble. Perhaps there were no other entries...
The judges were taken by one of the versions I liked least, and wanted the
addition of part of one of the others to give the final logo.
So I went back to my trusty Amiga, resized to get higher resolution (so
the logo would reproduce better), cut and pasted in DPaint, made a
negative of the image, converted the image to PCX format, and sent that on
disk to the user group. That is the logo they now use.
THE CIRCLE
Recently it occurred to me that perhaps the time had come to bring the
whole process full circle - from icon to PC logo and back to icon. So I've
used the new logo as the basis for the main icons for this MegaDisc......
To create these main icons, I converted the final PCX back to IFF, fiddled
with it in DPaint until the image was a suitable size for MegaDisc,
replaced the letters PCUG with MD45, removed ACT from under the typist, and
replaced a Parliament House flag with the Amiga bit.
Then I took the image back into IE (from whence it came, long long ago),
added a slightly-modified image for the selected view of the icon, and
turned the whole thing into an icon.
CONCLUSION
The new PCUG logo grew out of the TAD icon I created to accompany MegaDisc
stuff. Both the PC user group and MegaDisc are strong on Users Helping
Users, and some members of the PC user group also help Technical Aid to
Disabled (TAD), so it seems a particularly appropriate development from
that icon, doesn't it? And isn't it great that my beloved Amiga could play
such an important role? That's real Crafty Arts!
© Leigh Murray
Queanbeyan NSW
January 1996