What's the best way to make a badge?

[JacobJHC]

Just a quick question, if you make badges what do you do to make them? Once you finish how do you resize them? at the current moment I made a badge and the quality messed up and it is huge so a shove in the right direction would be awesome thanks.

Here's what I've got right now

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Being a FOSS guy you can use GIMP or Krita to resize the badges. When you resize you can pick from various scaling algorithms (they will be in a pulldown named filter or similar, eg. bicubic, Lanczos3,etc.), it's hard to recommend the best so try them all and see what works best. I've also read that scaling by no more than 50% at a time is a good idea. Another nice thing to do is to do a bit of sharpening after the scale, using either sharpen or the unintuitively named unsharp mask filter. Don't go crazy with sharpening because it can degrade the image pretty easily. 

Messing a bit with your badge I think you may want to scale the image first then add the text after, text doesn't scale very gracefully, especially diagonal text.

https://www.gimp.org/

https://krita.org/en/

 

Edited July 31, 2016 by Waxing_Kibbous

[JacobJHC]

7 hours ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Being a FOSS guy you can use GIMP or Krita to resize the badges. When you resize you can pick from various scaling algorithms (they will be in a pulldown named filter or similar, eg. bicubic, Lanczos3,etc.), it's hard to recommend the best so try them all and see what works best. I've also read that scaling by no more than 50% at a time is a good idea. Another nice thing to do is to do a bit of sharpening after the scale, using either sharpen or the unintuitively named unsharp mask filter. Don't go crazy with sharpening because it can degrade the image pretty easily. 

Messing a bit with your badge I think you may want to scale the image first then add the text after, text doesn't scale very gracefully, especially diagonal text.

https://www.gimp.org/

https://krita.org/en/

 

Thanks a bunch

[MDZhB]

GIMP is a great tool for making badges. However, if you want curved text, I've found that a word processor like LibreOffice Writer does the job nicely. In fact, as far as I know, GIMP can't make curved text at all.

Just a tip I'd figure I'd share. I've made a couple of circular badges, and I always prefer text that frames it nicely.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

http://www.ehow.com/how_8489743_curve-text-gimp.html

Gimp can do it too. Anyway, in graphics there is always more than one way to do anything and everything

 

 

[Corona688]

Inkscape can do it.  Or rather, you can tell it to follow a path, and have that path be a circle.

[MDZhB]

I would still say it's easier on a word processor, because you can just choose to write curved text, and then you can customize it in a multitude of ways, and even edit it afterwards.

[Corona688]

Music, landscape gardening, architecture - there was no start to his talents  -- Terry Pratchett

A word processor can do nearly everything you use your computer for -- but usually shouldn't.

[Curveball Anders]

11 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

 

 

A word processor can do nearly everything you use your computer for -- but usually shouldn't.

It's properly called 'an editor'.
So Vi(m) or Emacs?

 

[hellblazer]

Photoshop or Illustrator are the best options IMO. Options are endless.