Overall Rating

 

 

 

 

LogoMaker 3.0 by Studio V5 Corporation is great logo design software; one of the best. At first glance, TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner LogoMaker 3.0 has a straightforward and user friendly layout. Its default graphic user interface is in a contemporary light metal finish. The option buttons are easily accessible by way of side tool bars. LogoMaker 3.0 is a dedicated logo design software with loads of design tools and features. The well planned and balanced font and graphic tools and features facilitate high resolution logo creation. 

Font/Text Tools:

LogoMaker 3.0 is packed with an impressive set of tools and features to manipulate text. Some standard tools include text color, size and font options. Individual characters are easily handled using tools such as spacing and rotating angle, whereas entire text lines can be rotated and flipped vertically  and horizontally for the desired result. Text can also be shaped into a straight line, circular ring, concave (and convex), projective and wavy orientation.

Good tools are available to bring text alive in LogoMaker. Text Color tools start with adjustment, solid and gradient, which branch off to contrast, hue, saturation, brightness, opacity, angles and cycles. The Image Brush option is somewhat unique to LogoMaker 3.0, and can take an image file (JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIF) to use as fill for a text element. CMYK and RGB options for text color is another bonus.

Effects include shadow, blur, outline and filters that further refine to opacity, vertical and horizontal displacement, radius, sharpen and emboss. 3D effects include x and y camera, view angle, light intensity, shininess, light position, light color and depth. 

Plug-ins offer a few more design options such as color mosaic, jitter, pixelate, noise and swirl.

File Importing:

Current projects are saved to a proprietary .GBL format. Image files can be imported to LogoMaker 3.0 in JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIF format.

Graphic/Image Tools:

High quality 3D logos can be easily designed using LogoMaker 3.0. Design tools and features common to text designing can transform a design element to almost any shape and effect. LogoMaker 3.0 comes bundled with more than 1,500 professionally designed logo templates categorized by industry and interest and over 6,000 objects and shapes for making eye-catching 3D logos. All these design elements can be fully modified to produce the desired effect using shape, color, 2D and 3D effects, automation and plug-in options. These options further expand to more precise controls so as to better refine an effect. For example color tool expands to adjustment, solid, gradient and image brush, which again expands to more detailed controls.

With LogoMaker 3.0 a designer can also adventure into designing their own shapes using the Shape Editor. This vector based editor can be used to draw freehand, point-to-point lines and splines. Geometrical shapes such as rectangle, square, ellipse, circle, polygon and star with varying number of sides can be designed. The canvas can be resized to the desired size using pixel, mm, cm or inches as measurement units. The canvas edit options include white, color, transparent and image from file.

File Exporting:

Design files in LogoMaker 3.0 are saved to proprietary GBL format. Logos can be exported to JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIF, GIF and PDF in various sizes and quality.

Ease Of Use:

The very first impression LogoMaker 3.0 gives to a user is of ease of use, comfort and user friendliness. The user interface features a metallic finish that is soothing. All of the tools and features on the effect tool bar (Left Side) run down to more precise controls, and the whole interface is intuitive. Changes to a design element using any effect are reflected in the work area in real time without any delay and can be undone by clicking the reset button. 

Graphic objects and shapes are easily accessed by the library (right side) tool bar, which then can be selected and dragged to the work area. Options like undo, redo, zoom in, zoom out, fit to screen, lock objects, hide objects, delete, group, ungroup and alignments are neatly placed over the working area. The snap-to-grid option in canvas is helpful in aligning design elements. The Automation option is very useful in applying effects to design elements automatically. Effects such as right shadow, left shadow, front shadow, mirror, plastic, depth, glow, space outline, metallic and bump are applied by simply selecting a design element and then clicking on the required effect.

Help & Support:

Help files in LogoMaker 3.0 are loaded with the package itself and are thus accessible offline. The topics are both task and feature oriented. The commands are neatly divided into the two sidebars (Effect and Library). The help topics are also so divided to enable quick understanding of the topic at hand. The Online resources option has links to websites offering free and paid fonts and photographs. Other sections have Text Taglines that can be added to a logo. It also has a dedicated section dealing with the legal issues relating to logo designing like copyright, trademark and registration. The developer Studio V5 Corporation also has an online feedback form for providing support to its user.

Summary:

LogoMaker 3.0 is an amazing software loaded with just the right set of tools and features for designing high resolution 3D logos. Its well planned menus further enhance the user experience. For its price and performance ratio, LogoMaker 3.0 is an excellent choice, and definitely one of the best logo design software packages available.

LogoMaker Screenshots

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