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How to resize a text logo correctly in Photoshop

A lot of logos on the web look like they were run over by a truck. Blurry, jagged, hideous. Here's how to make your resized logos gorgeous and sharp.

The first point is to always save your graphics and logos as either a GIF or a PNG. Saving solid colour graphics and logos as a jpeg is a catastrophe and inevitably results in nasty digital noise. This sound elementary but I have had three trained graphic designers do this wrong, including a graduate of the Art Institute of California. The only one who knew the right answer (in what format to save a text logo) was our lead programmer, Peter.

For an example, one doesn't have to go further than the website of Royal Bank of Canada.


RBC logo: jpeg text buzz in action

Even billions of dollars won't save you from jpeg text buzz on your logos. Here are the jpeg jaggies in closeup:

Keep reading How to resize a text logo correctly in Photoshop

Photoshop CS3 Droplet: Save as GIF

Update 8 November 2010: Unfortunately neither Adobe PS4 nor PS5 include useful save for web droplets. With the disappearance of ImageReady, these droplets are gone, gone, gone. You can set up actions, but the actions won't use Save for Web but Save As. With Save As your outputted image has a preview as well as metadata baked in taking it from 50KB to 118 KB for instance. Lesson: don't uninstall ImageReady PS3 if you'd like to quickly and easily create really high quality web images. Nothing beats Photoshop as our GD and ImageMagick tests recently proved (ImageMagick came closer). Here's an Adobe forums post with some really tedious workarounds for web image droplets with CS4 and CS5.
 

If you use Photoshop CS3 and post screenshots to the web, this little droplet will save you a lot of trouble. For some reason it is impossible to convert ImageReady or previous Photoshop versions Droplets to Photoshop CS3.

Installation and Usage Instructions:

  1. download the zip
  2. decompress
  3. move to the folder of your choice (I have a special folder for Photoshop and Image Ready droplets)
  4. title your images for upload (spaces are okay - PS3 will convert them to hyphens)
  5. drop your images on the droplet
  6. your web ready GIF's will appear in your desktop folder

For equally unknown reasons is also extremely difficult to create a droplet which will actually open your image and resave it as you would like right in the folder where it lies.

Even my version here will save the GIF file to your desktop, rather than the folder where the original lies (my preference). Desktop isn't bad, as you can then upload the image and archive the extra desktop files every couple of days in a date named folder in a desktop archive folder.

Keep reading Photoshop CS3 Droplet: Save as GIF

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