Need a good mascot, what are my options?

Need a good looking mascot I can use as an avatar and so on for a new website. Is there good software for this? I'm looking at all options.

 

If you have the artistic talent and will be using the software more than once then there's the old standby Photoshop. Adobe's Illustrator will work too if you're looking for vector graphics (easily scaled up or down in size without loss of quality/pixelation). However, if you're not willing to shell out $700 bucks or so for either of them then you can use their freeware/open source alternatives.

If you're going to be using multiple sizes of the image then I'd say go with Illustrator/Inkscape. This way the source file can be scaled to whatever size you want without any pixelation or quality issues and saved as a .gif/.tiff/.jpg or whatever. Plus the source file will be fairly small. If you use Photoshop you'll have to make a very large image to start with (the largest you plan to use would be best) and then shrink it down to the other sizes. Since the image will be quite large to start with the file size will go up too, obviously.

The open source alternative to Photoshop is Gimp (which I'm sure you've probably heard of). The alternative to Illustrator is called Inkscape. For your purposes you wont miss any of the features that they lack that Adobe's products have so they'd probably be your best bet.

If, on the other hand, you lack both $700 and artistic talent then I'd suggest posting a job offer on a freelance site like GetAFreelancer.com, Guru.com or eLance.com and tell them what you want. If you just want a small mascot/logo you should be able to get it pretty cheap. If they do it in Photoshop, tell them you want the layered .PSD file and if you have it done in Illustrator tell them you want the .AI file. This will allow you, or someone else if you need them to, to modify the image more easily (change colors, add things to it, etc) should you ever need to tweak the image. Along with the layered file you'll want the actual usable image itself in .gif or .jpg or whatever other format you prefer so don't forget to tell the freelancer that or you'll just end up with a layered file that you can't use on a website.

Hope that helped a bit.

 

You really know your stuff. Thanks for the valueable information I give you two thumbs up!

 

You're welcome. Glad I could be of some help to you.

 

i make vector mascots, portfolio in my sig.