Need Help Designing Logo for Business Card

Hi folks. I'm trying to make what I thought was a simple design for my business/information card. I intend to use it as a business card and also as an information card inside a pack of vitamins.

The design I'd like to achieve is a pill capsule consisting of two solid colors. In the middle of the pill will be my vitamin company name in Helvetica Bold. I want to also have the text of the letters be the same as the colors of the pill. For example, if the pill were half black and half white, the font color will be white and black respectively. I'm not sure what colors I'll actually use; I wanted to play around with that. Maybe red and yellow.

I thought this would be simple to draw but I tried programs like gimp and openoffice draw, but they were more complicated to figure out than I realized. Any advice on how I can learn more and get this done?

Renzatic said:

Yup. Online tutorials. Specifically vector art tuts for GIMP, like this one. Hitting up either Google, Youtube, or Vimeo will net you hundreds upon thousands of them.

Keep in mind you won't be up and running after an hour or so. It'll take at least a couple days of practice and patience to even begin doing what you want to do. But stick with it, and you'll be able to make your business card in no time.

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Thanks. I thought my design was simple enough but I was still stuck after two hours with Gimp.

citizenzen said:

I'm having a hard time picturing this type treatment. Is the type split in half with the top half being one color and the bottom half being the other color?

If the top of the pill were black, then the top half of the type would be white. And the bottom half of the type would be black over the white capsule.

Correct?

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Imagine the pill on its side. So the left side will be white and the right side will be black. The text will read from left to right. And the color of the text will be the opposite of the background for readability.

I won't really use black and white. Probably red and yellow or blue and white. Still playing around with it.

I hadn't checked this thread in a while. Thanks for all the tips. Those are exactly the type of images I had in mind. I would make a few tweaks of course.

davedee65 said:

Hi OP I would suggest you try using Inkscape, it's free and you can output files in svg format which is vector based and therefore can be scaled to any size without loss of quality. This is what I produced very quickly using two circles, two squares and the text.

Cheers
D

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I tried installing Inkscape but couldn't even get that going. Every time I tried opening the program, the same message popped up, telling me that the first time I used the program it would take several minutes. There was another program, X11, that also popped up.

davedee65 said:

Hi OP sorry you had trouble with Inkscape. I forgot to mention that it requires the X11 system, and it does take a while to kick in the first time you run it.

You could try iDraw from the App Store which is a very cheap vector based drawing program which should be easy to get to grips with and exports to a variety of formats including svg and pdf.

But any software new to you is going to take a while to learn regardless of what you want to achieve or how simple you think the design is. To be honest if you are trying to create a brand image for a new, or existing, business/product I would strongly recommend hiring a professional designer to create your logo etc. It will be money well spent in the long term.

Cheers
D

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Thank you for the advice. I really appreciate everyone's suggestions here.

I'm starting this endeavor partly for the learning experience so it's interesting to learn how much works goes into every aspect of a business. When I "go big" I'll certainly hire a professional to handle things the right way. For right now, I'm quite happy to try my best doing everything on the cheap and learning as much as I can.