Glassix

If you're looking for a fast, easy and cheap way to put together banners, badges and various types of bars, you can turn to Glassix, an application that requires no designing experience.

Wrapped in a clean and intuitive interface, the program's main window provides quick access to all customization settings for the project, background, foreground, text and images, along with a second window for previewing results.

Thanks to the preview window, you can see how your graphical item looks like at all times, which means that tweaks can be effortlessly made on the spot. To get started, it's necessary to configure project settings when it comes to the name, website, author, email address and description, together with the banner width and height.

There is no option provided by Glassix for preserving aspect ratio while setting the width and height. On the other hand, you can take advanced of some presets for creating a userbar (350x19), banner (468x60, 234x60, 120x240), badges (88x31) and buttons (125x125, 120x60, 81x24).

All layers are visible by default (backdrop, scanlines, image, text, highlight, border). In additin to hiding any layer, it's possible to adjust its opacity and quality as well as to apply greyscale or blur effect.

Both simple and advanced options are available for the background, so you can set only the gradient direction and colors, or add multiple colors and set their exact position. The colors can be precisely specified thanks to the ARGB, HSB, decimal and HTML modes.

As far as scanlines are concerned, you can pick the line type (e.g. horizontal lines blurred, vertical, diagonal) and shadow mask (e.g. chainlink, checkerboard, heavy, light). You can customize the highlights (style, direction, start/end colors, position, start and opacity, gradient direction), borders (styles, colors), text (position, colors) and images to be integrated with the banner (position, width, height, rotation, opacity).

All aspects considered, Glassix comes wrapped in an intuitive interface and offers clear-cut options for designing various graphical elements. However, it can be used to develop only standard graphical projects since it doesn't have features for performing complex operations.