14 DAY TRIAL // In today's business world you have to be flawless to stay on the top. In the past, hard work and passion were usually enough to achieve this goal. Now things look different, and identity became more and more important.
When starting a company, probably most of your money will be used for buying hardware, building or space rental costs and other basic things. Getting a design firm to take care of your corporate identity can cost a lot of money, and today I will try to give you a solution for a part of this problem.
Corporate identity is usually seen as being composed of three parts - design, communication and behaviour. Usually, most of your budget will be engulfed by the first one. I will say just one word about it before proceeding: logo.
The company logo is the most important element of the design part when it comes to your identity and you can't start with your left foot ahead, using a bad one when entering the market.
AAA Logo is software designed to help you build your own logos and business cards without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for it. It has a feature-limited demo version available that I'm going to review for you today.
The installation kit is small, around 5MB in size, and the setup process finishes very fast. Once started for the first time, the program displays the Template Library screen, so you can choose the design you want to customize (or press ESC and start your own design).
The main program's interface is well built and easy to use. It has a large design area with an Object Library and a preview window to its left, and a Styles Library bar at the bottom.
After loading a template, all the objects available in it will be accessible from the Window menu or by clicking on them. I suggest that you use the first way, because it's easier to customize overlapped objects this way.
The Objects Library puts at your disposal over two thousands vectorial objects. Basically, they can be resized up to any desired size, but when looking closer, some of them look a bit rough. Since there are so many available, you have most chances to find what you're looking for.
If you already have a background designed for your company, and you want to use it, no problem! You can import custom graphics, and AAA Logo supports seven file types for this. Previewing your work against a colored background can be done easily using the Background Color item from the Edit menu.
Once you have added an object to your design, it has to be customized. You can add outlines, shadows, gradient overlays or change its color. You can't design new objects or change the existing ones other way than resizing or changing the rotation angle.
When the work is done, you have to export your logo. You can't save using any vectorial format such as SVG or AI, but you can use resolutions up to 600dpi for TIFF and BMP files. This doesn't leave too much room for professional editing using programs like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw. The good thing is that you can save as JPEG, GIF or PNG and send it straight to your website in a matter of seconds.
For people who like creating nice graphics without too much headache, AAA Logo could be a wise choice. It has enough features and tons of templates to use, but unfortunately you can't create your own objects, limiting your creativity to the program's libraries contents.
The Good
AAA Logo has thousands of object presets and fonts available, it is light, easy to use and fast. It has a lot of customization options for all the built-in elements.
The Bad
This demo version doesn't allow you to save the result of your work, and that should have been enough. Instead of limiting only that feature, the demo version doesn't allow you to use other fonts than those who's names start with "a". Some of the objects from the object library should have been designed more carefully. Help is almost absent.
The Truth
If you want a quick logo for your website or a business card, then AAA Logo would be one of the best choices around...if it wasn't for its price, a bit high for its features, in my opinion. The free demo version is a lot of fun to try, so you'll be able to see if it's the logo design program you need before buying it.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
