Quick Web Creations - Professional 2.0 Images

Create Web 2.0 Images in seconds!

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" Create Astonishly Attractive, Professional, Eye-Pleasing and Very Web 2.0 Text and Images - While Saving Thousands - Without Using Any High-End (or Low-End) Software Tools of Any Kind - All in Literally Less Than 1 Minute! "

App Name	QuickWebCreations (Web application)
App URL	http://www.quickwebcreations.com/
Browsers tested	Opera 9.25 (Works ok, except some sliders. Explained below) Firefox 2.0.0.11 (Works well, and is also the recommended browser) Tested on XP Home
Support Methods	Snail mail, phone, email
Upgrade Policy	Quote One-time membership fee of $6.97 but the price will probably increase when more features are added.
Price	$6.97
Reviewer Donation Link	Donate to TucknDar, the mini-review author
Screencast Video URL	Unfortunately I think you'll need to sign up to see the how-to videos, but anyway, here's the link: http://www.quickwebcreati...m/generator.php?do=videos
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	REVIEWER: I'm not the developer of Quick Web Creations, I'm not related to the developer, I don't know the developer and I'm not even paid to write this review. I am a paying member, however. When you sign up, you'll be able to refer others to QWC and get commission on any sales, through PayPal. This is not the reason why I've decided to make this mini-review, so I won't include my affiliate mail in this review, but I'd obviously be happy if you want to use it to make me some $s so just PM or mail me for instructions!!

Intro

QuickWebCreations (QWC) is a web application that makes Web 2.0 images. You can make logos, banners, buttons, and with a range of options, such as colours, fonts, stripes, gloss, glare, shadows, you name it.

From the horse's mouth:

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Here's what you get with the QuickWebCreations Membership

Instantly bring more credibility to your site - by making it more trendy, fresh, exciting and extremely pleasing to the eye!
Instantly, Free up hours of 'what was once lost' time - to truly develop your ideas, cultivating concepts, and implementing your solutions!
Quickly create Web 2.0 images - with glosses, shadows, reflections, and much more within seconds of logging into the site.
Benefit from viewing others' styles and image creations as a means of jogging the ol' creative spirit, and not worrying about how to then create your own! Great website repositories offer great ways of showcasing great sites, but offer an ego-smash when you're wanting to do something even remotely similar in style.
We give you the ability to use tags, titles, and pre-saved styles for all of your images, so that you can re-create those same styles later, with just *ONE CLICK*! No more searching in drop-downs for that 'style/gradient' you created in Photoshop (average time spent in finding it, 30 seconds for each task - and that's if you're organized).
Quickly access to saved images (where we save the exact style used/created) in one click (saves PNG, JPEG, GIF), in a searchable repository in your account.
No more searching in drop-downs for that 'style/gradient' you created in Photoshop (average time spent in finding it, 30 seconds for each task - and that's if you're organized).
Save hundreds - if not, thousands - on web designer costs in creating images you now can create in (literally) seconds, including the glossies, shadows, reflections, and much more!
Free up time to truly develop your ideas, cultivating concepts, and implementing your solutions instead of being bogged down by issues like... now, I can't remember, how do I apply a gradient to the outline of an image? OR how does this gradient slider work anyways?
Spend approximately 30-120 minutes less per project you create by not having to watch your current graphics software package simply 'boot-up' and execute!
Create amazing fill gradients, diagonal lines tiles to fill your image/text, or much more, without messing with tile creators or learning how or where to place pixels in your graphics processor to create these patterns from scratch. Also, IMMEDIATELY apply these gradients/patterns to an image or text for that polished look - is priceless in both time, money and CPU resources.
Eye-Pleasing, professional looking complex images or text for your website, salespage, blog, or digital scrapbook, is only a few seconds away, allowing you to try ideas for branding without taxing your wallet - with immediate visual results!
Spend less time exporting different formats of the same image - when all are quickly available to you at the 'tip of your mouse'. We create the PNG, GIF and JPEG format for you for each of your creations.
Quickly update your site with eye-poppingly attractive, and visually astonishing text titles to blogs, logos for new (or freshen your own) websites, or a simple sales/newsletter title!
Create STUNNING textual images that your friends will think you spent hundreds to have designed!
to mention on how much more time you'll have not trying to look for that perfect pattern that hopefully someone created so you can fill your text/image with.
More time to focus on what you do best - creating, developing, implementing your ideas without the worry and headache of 'how am I going to create my text logo for this web 2.0 market?
Free up an additional 2 minutes for each time you load up your current graphics editor, and free up your CPU without loading all of that extra software into memory... just to create a few quick images for your website.
Free up an additional 10-40 minutes per image, with not having to search through countless tutorials on 'How-To-Do' [DIY] sites for Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator.
Easily Create complex Web 2.0 images with dual [ or more ] gradients, mulitple outlines along with drop-shadows, reflections, and glossies in less time that it takes to take 2 sips from your cup-a-java!
Then list those benefits as bullet items in your sales letter. Alternating the font settings in your bullet items gives a little visual relief. Always end your list with the next bullet - in bold font
And much, much more!

According to the developer Bill Ortell, there are more features to come:

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Extra features like creating those "sun-ray" type Web 2.0 images { on the fly }, creating { on the fly } polaroid photos of images/photos/anything with a selected background (diagonal lines, gradient, etc.), and much more!

Some screenshots of the interface:

I made that DC logo in a minute or so. With more time and trial'n'error it'll look better Wink

The developer of QWC is also the man behind the Fresh Badge Generator which lets you make those Web 2.0 badges. Love them or hate them, they're at least easy to make at Fresh Badge :p

Who is this app designed for:

Web developers who don't want to or are able to spend a lot of time making logos, buttons and banners. I've spent countless hours looking for good logo tutorials and trying to follow them, sometimes with decent results, but usually I don't get it right...

Obviously you'll ideally be developing Web 2.0 sites, but the logos can be configured to look almost like whatever you want, so even for "regular" web sites I'm sure you'll be able to make a good looking logo.

The Good

Very fast and many configuration options makes it quite fun to use! I usually create graphics such as logos and buttons in The GIMP, but even when I've gotten used to and familiar with a procedure, it will take some time and QWC does this stuff a lot faster.

The Creations Gallery is helpful for getting ideas and input to various designs. Both good looking designs and awful designs. … the eye of the beholder... and all that Wink

By default the images created are transparent pngs, but you can also download your image in jpg or gif with white background.

There's some how-to videos to help you use the app. I haven't watched these though, it's very easy to use. embarassed

At less than $7 it's cheap!

The needs improvement section

As it says on the website, QWC works best with Firefox, which is fine, except Opera is my default browser… While I can use Opera (9.25, I haven't tried QWC in Kestrel yet) as well, the sliders don't behave at all, so you'll need to fill in the numbers manually.

Also I'd like to be able to configure lighting and shadows, which is currently not implemented, although it's planned for future releases.

Shadow or no shadow?:

Another thing I don't particularly like about QWC, although not really related to the image generator, is the front page. You'll need to do a lot of scrolling if you can be bothered to read everything. Some linked sections would be nice, although maybe that's not very Web 2.0?!? tellme

The aforementioned Creations Gallery is good for getting ideas, but not very well laid out, IMO. Before you can actually see all the creations, you'll need to scroll past a whole bunch of buttons to all the pages with member creations (at the time of writing there are 5565 member creations and with the default setting of 10 creations per page there are 557 buttons divided in rows of 14. That means scrolllllll...):

Why I think you should use this product

If you want web 2.0 images and don't know how to make them or if you're just tired of spending time making them, I think QWC is for you. Here's a few creation examples from QWC's website:

How does it compare to similar apps

Hmmm... are there any similar apps? I don't know. I guess it's comparable to making these sorts of images in Photoshop and The GIMP or any other GFX Editor of choice. They've obviously got many more features, but as I've already said you'll need to first learn how to make these sorts of creations and then you'll need to spend the time actually making them. With QWC you can spend seconds trying and failing before coming up with something you like.

Conclusions

At the price of just $6.97, even if you don't need a whole lot of Web 2.0 images this is a fun tool! If you actually need a new logo or some buttons, this cheap and easy alternative is excellent. I don't know what else to say, but try it.

If you're unsure of signing up before actually trying this, maybe you should try the free Badge generator first, to see how this works. Fresh Badge Generator

Maybe I sound like the PR person at QWC (I'm not, by the way...), but I really think this is a very cool web application.

If you feel like trying this but don't want to pay, just post here, PM or mail me some general instructions for a logo or button and I'll make one with QuickWebCreations to show you what it does.

Links to other reviews of this application

If you're anything like me & struggle using Photoshop.... you'll just love QWC.

I'm not good at creating graphics, especially not logos, so I thought for $7, why not give it a try? I'm glad I did.

So, for under $7 I got an awesome tool that can help me a lot on graphic building