Jetpack Samurai Logo?
Hey All!
While working on the website I realized I needed a “logo” of some kind for Jetpack Samurai, or at least some kind of visual to represent the project on our website. Of course, we are a long way from the art phase of our project- we will need to hire an artist to do character design and start drawing pages once we finish the first issue script. Despite the actual publication of the comic being a long ways down the road, I thought it was important to start drumming up some interest now- possibly build a following (wishingful thinking, I know). This was somewhat of the purpose behind the website and, to a degree, the podcast SnarfTalk. Of course that wasn’t the only reason- we also thought it would be cool to build a website, blog, and podcast that lets our listeners “go along for the ride” so to say- giving people a little insight into the process (and frankly learning along the way with us… we don’t know much at this point!) Also, as Jerry pointed out in our last podcast, we thought that doing all this would help keep us motivated to continue working diligently- it just makes the whole thing seem more real and achievable.
So I set out to create some kind of a visual representation of our story. While I am not a professional graphic designer by any means, I did take some graphic design in college and have dabbled for many years into graphic design. When I started my online business 12 years ago, iTrees.com I had to do ALOT of my own graphic design and website building- so I’m fairly serviceable at it. I didn’t want to dedicate an inordinate amount of time- just make a quick and easy visual representation that I could live with. The search commenced to find a stock image and font so I could whip something up at least temporarily. While most graphic designers know and use stock images frequently, I don’t think the average person knows much about them. There are many, many websites dedicated to providing free or paid stock imagery that can be used for a variety of purposes. Artists, designers, and photographers will produce all kids of art and content and then sell them, or give them away, on various different platforms. Paying for stock images usually nets better results- it can cost a bit at times, but gives you access to much better graphics and images to choose from. Some of the most popular stock image websites are ShutterStock.com and iStockPhoto.com - and they have some reasonable plans. I also happen to already have a plan with them since we use stock images frequently in my other businesses- so that helps with the cost significantly. There are also a few free websites which I have used, namely Pexels.com and Canva (which is particularly awesome for a variety of things).
The one I choose to use most is ShutterStock- they just seem to have lower pricing and still have good content. From there I just did a search for “Samurai” and set the filter to “Illustrations” (since I didn’t want to use a photograph for this situation). I had a lot of really cool illustrations to choose from, but to be honest I only browsed through the first pages of the hundreds of pages of results- I found one pretty quickly I was happy with. Now, I could do an entire blog post on image formatting (and I probably will some day), but when you are working with illustrations you always want to get a copy of the “Vector File”. Vector images are a lossless format- I won’t go into too much depth, but basically think of them as a computer rendered drawing of an image. The benefit of vector files is that they can be re-scaled, re-sized, and manipulated without destroying or pix-elating the image. If you have ever resized or re-scaled an image, only to have the resulting image be blurry or skewed, it is because you are using the wrong image formatting- just stop…,research, hire a freelancer, or use one of many online resources to help you. Just as a quick side reference- check out Fiverr.com , its an online budget freelancing website where you can hire freelancers to do about anything- from creating graphics, business cards, advertisements, invitations- about anything you can think of really- you can even hire people to write blog posts for you (but who would ever do that)!
From there, I loaded my newly acquired illustration into Adobe Illustrator, a program designed for manipulating and working with vector images. This is a pretty expensive program, and I just happen to have it already because I use for my other businesses. However, if you plan on doing a lot of graphic design it is worth checking out some of their monthly plans. Other cheaper options would be: hire it done on Fiverr, or download an open source (that means free and community supported) Adobe Illustrator clone called Inkscape. Inkscape is pretty damn good, almost as good as Adobe Illustrator- it just has a bit of a higher learning curve- but it will get the job done nonetheless. After I loaded in my image to the canvas and manipulated it to the size I needed, I knew I needed a pretty cool font for the “Jetpack Samurai” header, and nothing in the stock windows or adobe fonts was cutting the mustard…BACK TO THE INTERNET! I fired up google and did a search for “Free Fonts”- I found a website which I have used many times before called FontSpace.com. I browsed around a bit, did some searching, and found one that I liked! Great! All I had to do was download the font file and click it to install it into windows- very simple.
Next, I just had to reformat my image a little- add the text with the new font- and I was almost home free! I needed to format it correctly for the web, so I went ahead and opened up my trusty copy of Adobe Photoshop- also another fairly expensive program. If that is not available for you, Adobe makes a “lite” version called Adobe Photoshp Elements, which is still extremely powerful. There is also an open source alternative to Photoshop called GIMP- it is also pretty damn good- with just a bit of a steeper learning curve. I opened up a new file and put in my formatting requirements (in this case I was creating an image to be 500 pixels by 400 pixels). I simply copy and pasted the vector file into Photoshop, sized and rastered the image, and “saved for web” as a JPG (I usually use PNG because it is a bit superior). Ok, maybe I am oversimplifying things- but that is for another day, and another blog article!
Voila! I had created a brand new (albeit “temporary”) graphic to represent our story Jetpack Samurai! All in all it took me about 5-10 minutes thanks to the wonder of stock images! So, what do you think- is it a keeper, or back to the drawing board?
If you have any questions or comment please feel free to let me know in the comments section! Make sure you follow us on Instgram, Twitter, and Facebook @SnarfComics on all platforms- and never miss an episode of SnarfTalk Podcast- available on iTunes and all podcast platforms!