Can anyone please recommend a tool, preferably free, for designing a logo for a website?
The ones I've tried using make simple tasks feel very difficult. I want to be able to
use textboxes for translating words into pixels;
import existing images;
scale and move everything to fit together.
Probably the easiest tool to use is Inkscape. There is a learning curve to all software, though. Install it by typing the following command in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install inkscape
Inkscape is free. It is an open source equivalent for Adobe Illustrator. It allows you to draw vectors (stars, squares, cricles,..), to select their colors, to cut and paste them, to add text, and more.
Once you have designed your logo you can export it as a .png (pronounced ping) file. That file you can use in your website. If it is too large you can downscale it or you can make it a .jpeg file by opening it with gimp and saving it as a .jpeg file.
I use Inkscape and GIMP for my professional graphics work. I usually make logos in Inkscape and then use GIMP for minor editing and finishing.
Other good vector graphics software is Xara Xtreme. It's pretty fast and quite efficient but its development seems to be stalled as the last released version is pretty dated now.
