As the iPhone developer’s platform mactures, applications are divided between not doing enough, doing everything you need and having way too many features? This hasn’t been a question in the last few years, especially with applications not being able to share data across each other. Now, there are enough options, a user has to decide what they are actually needing an application to do to be useful before making a purchase. An area like ‘Notes’ has options that are too limited to be truly useful all the way to ones that have so much detail that it takes too long to get anything simple done, like entering a quick reminder note.
Today, if you are looking to do basic ‘work’ on your iPhone, some time should be spent exploring the options in the area of your needs. Research will result in apps that do just what you need, within a few limitations, to get work done via your mobile device.
Case in point, The Logo Creator application. It offers functionality at the level you would expect from a handheld UI without over complicating while still having enough power to make it worth a person’s time to use.
Many clients do well with a rough drawing of ideas to get things started. Those can be meetings around a whiteboard or professional sketches with pen. There are the other clients that can’t get past the pen and need to see something ‘real’. Logo Creator is a pretty powerful drag-n-drop logo creation tool that has been around on the Mac desktop for years (they are currently shipping version 5.2).
Now, on the iPhone, there is a Logo Creator app that allows you to take your ideas and rough them out very quickly between meetings or while riding mass transit. There is no need to take out your notebook, logos can be put together and saved as images with your finger.
The opening screen offers you the options of ‘Create Logo’, ‘Templates’, ‘Place Logo’ and ‘Your Logos’. In reality, you can skip the middle two. Creating logos with text and the many available images and backgrounds are available from the first button.
You can drag the images around the canvas for placement as well use the pinch and expand to adjust the size to match your vision. Adding text is equally easy with similar placement and sizing with your finger.
Like the desktop version, you can make a lot of fine tuning adjustments to the text. Color of the text, Glow and Shadows are adjustable with color adjustments as well changing of the text font.
Jumping around the many adding of images and text is easily done via the Canvas area. A pleasant surprise was the ability to move anything on the canvas forward or backward so you get the right depth impression.
If you need to exit the logo creation or your done, save your work. Even though you are finished, the logo is not flattened so you can always go back and adjust as new ideas come to you. From the Your Logos area, you can select one of your logos and save it to the built in Photo library. I did notice that a few times the image saved to the Photo library is blank. Going to the Your Logos area, choosing to to edit the logo, saving it again seems to allow the logo to be sent to the Photo library. While that is the work around – hopefully the app developer will correct this issue.
Does the app do everything I can imagine? No, this isn’t photoshop, but the iPhone isn’t a quad core desktop either. It does as much as a person would want to do via a handheld – quickly, anytime I have a few minutes to get my idea into a image any client would understand. At the time of this review, The Logo Creator app with all of the art and editors is less than $2.
The below was done in less than ten minutes and got us the acct! Like I normally say, your milage may vary.