I consider myself a powerish user but for some reason have never dabbled in image editing or drawing, other than the shapes and flowcharts tools in Word and PowerPoint.
Anyway, me and my kids have bought a badge making machine to make 25mm badges to sell at festivals. In the US do you call them button badges or pin badges or lapel badges?
We want to design our own using images, text, shapes and backgrounds. I guess it is standard graphic design stuff?
Do I need a photoshop or illustrator type application? Any suggestions? I had a quick look at pixelmator but the approach didnât seem the best e.g.for drawing a line and then saying âmake that line twice as thick and a different colourâ . I guess my brain was looking for a line object as per Office apps but do I need to relearn that to make use of other types of drawing app?
An obvious choice in my mind would be the Affinity suite of apps. You could start with just Affinity Designer to see if it works for you. (Especially the iPad version.)
I would second Affinity Designer. This is a âIllustratorâ type application rather than a âPhotoshopâ type. A year ago I had occasion to make ~300 such buttons. Each somewhat customized to an individual. I used Affinity Designer and was happy with the result.
Making perfectly circular drawings of the correct size and curving the lettering etc. are precisely the sort of thing that vector-graphic programs like Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are made for.
As a side note, I wondered whether I could rent a machine to actually make the buttons. It turned out that I could which was a blessing in the setting of having to make a large number of buttons. I rented an âindustrial qualityâ sort of machine to make the individual buttons, and the results were totally professional.
