How To Create A Band Logo From Start To Finish Using Xara for Free!

Okay, now that we have everything installed and ready to go, we can start the creation process. Start by selecting the text tool on the left side of the screen, or if you're lazy like me, you just click the "t" on your keyboard -- shortcut for the text tool.

Type out "Drop the World" -- then select the text and change it to "28 Days Later" in the pulldown menu on top. Next, up the size of all the text to 72pt. Push escape ONCE so you're no longer in text mode.

Change tools to the selector tool (The pointer in the top left -- V is the keyboard shortcut) and select the text you've just written.

Now this is important, once your text is selected with the proper selector tool, click Arrange>Convert to Editable Shapes.

Next click Arrange>Ungroup. Repeat this step again click Arrange>Ungroup. It's very important that you ungroup the text twice as it will only break into single letters if you do this.

At this point your screen should look like the picture. Notice the small square boxes at the top of each letter.. If your letters don't have squares you probably didn't ungroup twice, or you didn't convert the text into a shape.

The next step is to regroup the the text so it's easier to work with to get the desired result. That means that instead of having each letter as an individual group, we want it to be grouped by each word. This is pretty simple though.

First hit escape a couple times to make sure you aren't selecting anything. Next, using the selector tool, click and hold to make a box around "DROP". Now that you have only the D, R, O, & P selected click Arrange>Group.

Now do the same for THE, & WORLD respectively. You should now have three objects to work with -- DROP, THE & WORLD.

Now, we're going to click on the group DROP and select the button in the picture above. This should change the square handles around the word to arrowed handles. Click it again to go back to the normal selection mode.

Grab the top left handle and swivel DROP to give it about a 6 degree tilt.

Repeat that process for WORLD but swivel it only slightly in the opposite direction.

Now grab world and move it such that the W and P are lined up as in the original picture.

BTW, while you're working, if you hold CTRL and scroll, it will zoom in and out of the screen. This is by far the most useful shortcut in Xara for me and will make the next step a lot easier.

Right now, you're logo should look pretty similar to the picture above. The next step is pretty simple though so don't fear.

Click on THE and size it down so that it'll fit on the side of the W. You can do this by dragging the handles around THE to reduce the size. Click the button I showed you earlier to bring the spin handles up and roughly try to line it up with the W.

Line it up with the W and fine tune it until you're happy with the position.