Sounds good in theory, but LogoDesign Studio Pro is too wonky to use much of the time.

Software that tries to do the work of professional apps on the cheap is tough to get right—it has to be accessible to average users while delivering the advanced features that pros expect. Sadly, Macware fails to bring logo design to the masses with its not-at-all-professional LogoDesign Studio Pro.

LDSP makes a good first impression, anyway. With its user-friendly Toolbar and plenty of nice-looking templates to get you started, it looks like a long-lost iWork app. In theory, all you need to do is customize a logo template with your organization’s name and some creative flair, and then export the new logo to your website or letterhead in one of several image formats. We smelled trouble when we noticed the Choose button in the template selection window didn’t work—only double-clicking templates opened them.

Using multiple objects in your logo—text, photos, vector graphics, anything—just doesn’t work; selecting and moving things is an almost completely unpredictable process. Sometimes we were able to select objects by clicking on them directly; other times, they could only be selected by hunting around to find an invisible zone of clickability unrelated to the object’s onscreen appearance. You can’t shift-click to select multiple objects, but sometimes you can drag a selection box around them—although you’ll probably only be able to change their position by tediously nudging them with the arrow keys. In our testing, the ability to move items by dragging with the mouse came and went. But even when the app is behaving, you can’t resize—or rotate, or skew—multiple selected objects together, forcing you to alter every element in your logo individually.

Layers don’t help. Not only must you highlight and activate a layer with a checkbox in the Layers window to work in it, overlapping or adjacent objects remain difficult to select, even across multiple layers. Worse, odd bugs abound: Grouping objects in one layer usually groups all objects in your document if other layers are invisible. Adjusting a layer’s opacity affects just Bézier path shapes—not editable text or raster images—and even then, only an object’s fill color changes. Raster images simply pop in and out of existence as you adjust the opacity of their layers. But these issues won’t bother you for long. More often than not, working with layers (or just about anything) will cause LDSP to crash.

LogoDesign Studio Pro just wasn’t ready to release. Designers of any skill level will be stopped in their tracks by its frustrating, unstable performance.

COMPANY: Macware
CONTACT: www.macxware.com
PRICE: $59.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later
Comes with plenty of attractive logos to customize. Familiar iWork-like interface. Universal binary.
Almost impossible to work with multiple objects in a document. Buggy, unpredictable features. Crashes frequently.