Okay, so anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a total loss when it comes to creating graphics.
I can manage to put together some block letters with a simple gradient in GIMP, a free photo manipulating program. It only takes me about three hours to manage, and it never looks very good. Someone who is good at that sort of thing does it in a couple of minutes.
So when I saw the ads come up for Quick Web Creations, that promises two minute creation of web 2.0 style graphics, I went over to take a look. And in the spirit of this blog, I plunked down my money to give you all the good and the bad about the site.
The Good
You really can create great web 2.0 style text and logos in a few minutes. You’ll spend more than that playing around with the different options, but I took about three minutes to create this graphic:
Yeah, I went a bit crazy with the different options (but took off the partial reflection at the last minute).
What I love about this site is that the tools are designed for people who know nothing about graphics. Using GIMP, to create a border around text, you had to select the text as a region, invert the selection, use the fill tool, etc. Using Quick Web Creations, you just select the size of the border you want.
Well worth the one-time $27 fee.
The Bad
There’s the obligatory one-time offer when you join that allows you to upgrade to premium membership.
Premium membership isn’t bad. You get the ability to see what other members have created, to get inspiration for your own creations. You can rate others creations, you get access to libraries of graphics, etc. Lots of good stuff there.
The bad part is that one of the premium features is the ability to save your graphics in a form that can be brought up and worked on later. Using the basic membership, you must complete your graphics creation in one sitting, and then download it as a PNG, GIF, or JPG file. If you decide you want to tweak something later, you must create it entirely from scratch again.
Having the ability to save is critical for something like this if you want to test slightly different banners for advertising, and vary the design elements between each. Yet saving is only available through the premium membership.
Okay, so I’d pay for premium membership if it was another one-time fee, but it isn’t. It’s a monthly fee. That might make sense for people who create graphics constantly, but my need for graphics just isn’t that huge.
For what I’ll save by not upgrading to premium on the site, I’ll be able to pay a professional to create whatever graphics I want when I need them.
Conclusion
The basic membership is well worth the $27 you pay for it. The premium membership is, in my opinion, over priced for what you get. But for quick one-off banners, logos, and stylized text, the basic membership will work well.
I hate it when they make it sound like it is a really good deal and it might be but then they expect you to upgrade to get the full service. I guess that if it is worth it then it would alright. I have never been good at making these graphics.
Me too, Rosa. I think saving and loading designs should have been part of the basic service, not an upgrade. If the basic service had been free, I could see not providing saving/loading, but not since they’re charging for it.
A helpful reader emailed me to say that FlamingText.com offers similar services, for free.
I checked it out, and wanted to give everyone a quick mini-review…FlamingText.com is comparable to the basic membership at QuickWebCreations, although I found it more difficult to use. In some ways there weren’t quite as many options, although you could do effects at FlamingText.com that you couldn’t at QuickWebCreations.
Thanks for the mini review Jay. If you look hard enough on the Internet, you can almost find everything bing offered for free but it may not be as good as the other(hey it’s free though).
I’m very glad to see you all taking the QuickWebCreations concept and others so seriously 🙂 I’m actually glad I saw these posts… (by accident I must say) but as the designer/developer/owner/creator of QWC – I wanted to just quickly comment.
The $27 is lifetime with upgrades within itself as time progresses… just an FYI… and yes INDEED there are dozens of *frankly, really great* free tools on the ‘net – but the difficulty comes in:
1. professional quality
2. extensive features
3. combining effects from one site into another’s 😉
4. ease of use for complex designs/results –
many people discount #4 above… entirely!
some people have no problem going and spending hours per week creating graphics – having to do multiple file saves, and going to multiple sites, to accomplish what takes literaly seconds to accomplish on the development of great professional high-quality images… (which was secret and I used solely until I launched it for the public use).
Topics that make it REALLY useful – are:
1. gradients (outlines, interior fill)
2. one-click reflections
3. reflecting not just text, not just images, but both!
4. yadda yadda
Anyways, just wanted to make sure you all were aware of some of these things… and (oh, btw) the $27 is LIFETIME :).
This fee also helps for development of future upgrades, enhancements, other projects that continually are offered to current members at ‘grandfathered’ pricing/discounts (for example – those that got into QWC before the $27 were able to upgrade at $17 not $37.
I’m very open to your comments though but wanted to just make sure you both (and others’) were aware of just some of the reasons/diff’s of QWC and other online apps :).
(PS. did you both check out one of my first apps created? (not sure if this is allowed, but remove if necessary – freshbadge.com – it’s 100% free and pretty slick))
Anyways, have a great July 2008 all!
Hi Bill, glad you found us here! QWC is a very nice tool, although if you added the ability to save projects and work on them again later to the basic membership, it’d be an outstanding one.
BTW, FreshBadge.com looks very nice, too. I hadn’t seen that one before, but it looks quite useful.