If you use Photoshop, then you have a tool on hand that you can use to design labels. And, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, because you have access to two great Photoshop tutorials at hand. The first tutorial, written by Pariah S. Burke, shows how to build and re-use a label template for items such as the business cards shown above.

Using Photoshop and Worldlabel Label Templates, Burke – a noted author, graphic designer and Photoshop guru – shows users how to create a template in Photoshop step-by-step. The result is a PDF that you can reuse over and over. And, if you’re not as comfortable with Photoshop as you are with Illustrator or even InDesign, Burke shows how the same PDF label templates from WorldLabel.com work equally well in those applications with a remarkably similar procedure. Read the complete tutorial at Photoshopsupport.com

Another tutorial, written by Linnea Dayton & Cristen Gillespie (authors of The Photoshop CS/ CS2 Wow! Book) for Layers Magazine, shows users how to design labels that you can modify quickly for related products. Using a label template from Worldlabel, they show how to use the PDF to create multiple labels for varied products, such as the label for the box shown below.

You’ll discover a world of easy ways to create labels through Worldlabel’s PDF templates and Photoshop. Just follow the steps in both tutorials and you may discover new ways to design your labels, too. Take advantage of what you have at hand to create some astounding works of art today!

Two great free excellent graphic editors you might want to try Inkscape.org and Gimp.org

All you need to do is select the image you want to share, hit the Drop It button and PiccDrop uploads your image and redirects to the hosted image url. You can also choose to get the html/bb code and PiccDrop uploads your image and provides the code.

There is no limit on quantity of images to upload and the maximum file size of 6mb is generous. The site is free, supports most image file formats including jpg, bmp, gif, tiff, pdf, svg, etc., and its only restriction is no adult content.

Although PiccDrop claims to host your image forever and ever, we think the site is best suited for casual sharing of one or two images at a time. There are other online image hosting sites that allow you to index your family photos and bulk upload. PiccDrop is ideally suited for when you need to share an image fast on the web.

In this post, I’ll stick to the many cool tools to choose from if you’re using a Windows-compatible PC. Stay tuned for future posts about Mac and Linux-compatible tools.

RoundMyCorners is a simple online image editing tool intended for people who just want to round the corners of their photos or graphics and don’t have or don’t want to take the time to learn an editing program such as Photoshop. All you do is click “Browse” and upload a JPEG, GIF or PNG image. Tell the program “how round” you want the corners of the image (in pixels) and what you’d like the background color to be, if not transparent. RoundMyCorners will give you back a PNG, JPEG or GIF image.

If you want to match text to photos or graphics for professional-quality labels, there are several free online “color pickers” that will save you the trouble of opening your file in an image editor and dragging out the eyedropper tool just to get the RGB or hex code for the color you want to match. One such program is ColorPic (image shown at right), which is a freeware Windows program. It has a built-in magnifier and mouse “nudge” function, and ColorPic also takes the guesswork out of selecting an entire palette of colors. A couple of programs designed to sample colors directly from the Web are Instant Eyedropper and ColorSchemer’s ColorPix.

Say you want to superimpose a picture of one of your associates over an image of your office and make a business card out of it to print on World Label labels or along with free printable business cards from my site, FreePrintableBusinessCards.net. A freeware program called Merge makes it a one-step process to incorporate elements of two images into one, join four images into a quadrant or merge text with an image. For instance, you could also use Merge to watermark your copyrighted photos on labels or other materials.

How about if you’re still in startup mode and haven’t yet had a company logo designed? CoolText is a graphics generator that can quickly serve up a logo based on a couple of dozen designs with the text, font and color of your choosing. In some cases, you can even upload your own background image. CoolText spits out a downloadable file in formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, Photoshop and .XCF (GIMP), ready to print onto labels or add to free printable business cards.

With all of these great tools, you can have fun designing your own labels without the headaches. Remember, if you’re using an online label-design template, such as those available from WorldLabel or FreePrintable.net, be sure to keep all artwork at least one-eighth inch from the edge of the labels.

Kevin Savetz is the creator of FreePrintable.net, a network of more than 25 sites that offer printable certificates, business cards, resume templates, and other printable items.

There are times when all you want or need is something to just work and get the job done quickly and efficiently without frills or fuss. You probably don’t want to fire up Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator to create just a few labels. You want legibility, and maybe some zip, but edgy for your file labels is probably not what you had in mind when you contemplated cleaning up your file folders.

Enter gLabels, a hassle free label creator and business card program for the Gnome environment which does its job perfectly and will have you producing fabulous labels and business cards in a snap. With gLabels, less is more in that the drawing tools at your disposal are limited, but that’s probably the key to its and your task’s success.

The program is designed to work with various laser and inkjet labels and comes preloaded with virtually every Avery label size in existence. When you click on New, you are prompted to choose the Avery label you need, and then a screen with your selected blank label appears in the workspace. Now, with just the right number of tools, you can design something nice and quick.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we created shipping labels for the holidays. To get started, we selected the Avery 5164 shipping labels from the pull down menu.

We then selected the line tool to draw a line separating the return address from the ship to address. The line tool is in between the square and circle tools. Its icon is a diagonal line. You can increase/decrease the size of the line to suit.

We then inserted a holiday photo from our computer by selecting the “create image object.” It is the tool with a house and sun in the background. We clicked on the file folder which and then navigated to the location on our hard drive where the photo was stored.

Next, we selected the text tool (it has the capital T) to insert our “from” address. We deleted the word “text” and inserted our address.

If you would like to change the size and font of the text, click on the “style” tab. The text tool is straightforward enough with the exception of font size being located in the Style tab.

We then inserted another text box in the “ship to” area. You can enlarge the text box by putting your cursor over one of the green corners. A plus sign will appear and then you can click and drag the corner out to enlarge. We typed in our ship to address under the text tab, then increased the font size under the style tab. While we were there, and since we felt so festive, we changed the font color to green.

And there is our shipping label. If you do a print preview, you see you have 6 shipping labels going to the same address, which probably is not what you wanted.

You could delete the “ship to address” and print the labels blank and then hand write the ship to address. Or if you really want to be fancy, you can do a mail merge.

Mail Merge

With your document open, go to the Objects command in the file bar and select merge properties in the pull down menu. A merge properties dialog box will open. Select your data source format, in our case a csv file, and the filename location.

You can click on the triangles in the dialog to check your information and when satisfied, click the ok button.

Now you add your merge fields to your document. The first line in our example contains a single merge field (”${1}”) corresponding to the first field of a record (first column of a line) which contains the family’s name we are shipping to.

We have a total of 5 fields to insert which correspond to the name, address, city, state and zip code. We added them all in one text box as shown below.

Now go to File and select print from the pull down menu, then click on print preview.

If you are doing a mass mailing and have the need to insert barcodes, gLabels has this feature too. The barcode tool is located next to the “create image object” tool. Click on the barcode tool and a dialog box appears where you can select your barcode language and other style features.

All in all gLabels is a simple program which can handle your label printing needs with style and speed. It’s just the right tool for the right job.