Tips for designing KSP logos

[Second Hand Rocket Science]

Howdy y'all,

I've been making a lot of KSP program logos recently using my GIMP editor program. The results are... passable. 

Observe.

Spoiler

 

I'm looking for some tips to up my game when it comes to this. Specifically, if you look at the logo for Proton Space Labs, there's some sort of strange white outline to all the sections I've recoloured. I want to fix that so you can actually read the small words underneath.

PS: "Acorn Aeronautics - Intuitive Rocket Design" was the first one I ever made. It's bland. Really bland.

Many thanks in advance.

[The Aziz]

What you need is layers. I'm not even sure if gimp has them but you can get plenty of freeware programs to work with. Krita, for example. Background on the bottom layer, and everything else above it. And if you're coloring the insides of objects, make sure they're transparent where they should be. It's often presented as grey and white checkerboard where there's no color. Also make sure to select only the bit you're applying new color to or else it will spread to the whole canvas or do something weirder.

Edited June 11, 2022 by The Aziz

[Second Hand Rocket Science]

Alright, I'll give it a shot.

[Snark]

On 6/11/2022 at 6:16 AM, Second Hand Rocket Science said:

Specifically, if you look at the logo for Proton Space Labs, there's some sort of strange white outline to all the sections I've recoloured.

Yup, as @The Aziz said, what you need here is layers.

The thing that's causing that outline is anti-aliasing.  Here's what that means:

Take a look at the following image.  Note that the text on the bottom seems smoother and "nicer" than the text on the top, which has "jaggies" at the contrast between black and white pixels.

That's because the bottom text uses anti-aliasing to "smooth" it.  What that means is that the drawing program I used to make that text will generate various gray-scale pixels around the boundary, to create the visual impression of smooth round edges even though the image is made out of hard, sharp, square pixels.  The top one looks "jaggy" to you because you can see the shapes of the pixels at the word boundaries; those "jaggies" are the sharp, square pixel edges.  In general, people tend to find the look of smoothed images more pleasant, so it's pretty common to see anti-aliasing used a lot.

Here's a blown-up version of the image so you can see a bit more clearly what's going on:

So... anti-aliasing makes things smoother and nicer, so it's a good thing, right?

Well, yes... except when it isn't.    In particular, anti-aliasing makes image compositing a problem.

Suppose I gave you that original image up above, and you thought:  "Yay!  This is just what I need! ...Except I need the background to be blue, not white.  Well, no problem.  I'll just take the paint-bucket tool in my drawing program, and use it so that every white pixel in the image will be made blue instead."

In which case, here's what you'd get:

See that awkward "white" boundary around it?  And notice how it's only a problem on the anti-aliased version?

That's the problem with anti-aliasing in a single-layered image.  It's very compositing-unfriendly.  Because on the anti-aliased version, there are a bunch of pixels around the rim of the letters that aren't either black, or white-- they're shades of gray in between the two.  So your paint-bucket tool in your drawing program kinda throws up its hands and doesn't know what to do.  (There are some fidgety bits with the tool settings that a good drawing program can use to try to work around the problem and make it not quite so glaringly obvious, but it's still not perfect.)

The fundamental problem, here, is that conceptually this image has a foreground (black letters) and a background (white field).  At the time the anti-aliased letters were rendered, the drawing program had first-hand knowledge of the foreground and background colors and was able to calculate the in-between colors itself.  However... as soon as that was then collapsed down to a single-layer image, all knowledge of "foreground" and "background" is lost.  So when you come along, after the fact, and try to work with a thing that has already been anti-aliased, then your drawing program is missing the context it needs to be able to change the background out from under the foreground part of the image.

To composite an image together the way you want, and have smooth edges without jaggies, and have differing colors the way you do, is certainly doable.    But it will involve getting a little fancy with layers, and describing a blow-by-blow "how to" for that is probably a longer discussion than folks here would want to read.

(In addition to which, how I would do it is not necessarily the ideal way, since I am by no stretch of the imagination a graphic designer, and someone who actually knows what they're doing could probably do it considerably more efficiently than I could.)

So, I won't specify an exact solution, here-- but thought you might like a discussion of what the actual issue is. 

[dci]

GIMP users: Use layers, use transparency and create selections from layer's alpha channel. Then you'll get fancy antialiased flags.

Here is one, I created yesteray, one big table, consisting of 3 different flags placed in line:

Spoiler

Also, if you want perfect circles or simply maintain aspect ratio, keep in mind, that (big) flag is 512x256 pixels (ratio of 2), but it is rendered as 512x320 (ratio of 1.6), so create 512x320 image and before export just resize to 512x256.