Small Text In Logos

[riverbirch]

Hi,

I'm using photoshop to create a small banner and icon for my site and because of the size the text seems blurry.

Is there a font which works best for very small text? Any other suggestions?

Thanks

[Dubbya]

What I usually do for small fonts, say 6-8 points, is open the text formatting palette, select the text layer, choose Arial or Tahoma and set the antialising to "none".

Alternatively, you might try selecting "sharp, crisp, strong or smooth" antialiasing to see which one gives you the best results.

You might also try creating your logo in a vector art program such as CorelDraw, Freehand or Adobe illustrator. Scale it down the the approximate size you need, export it at 150 dpi and save it as an .eps. You can then open the .eps in Photoshop, set the resolution to 72-96 dpi when you open it, then scale it down a bit in Photoshop if you need to. Just be sure that when you scale (resample) an image that you specify "Bicubic Sharper" so that you avoid making it blurry.

Failing that, if you've already resized an image and it's still a little too blurred, you can use the "Sharpen/Unsharp Mask" filter with the following settings.

Amount: 38%
Radius: 1.3 pixels
Threshold: 0

Good Luck

[benihana]

In addition to the great suggestions above, take a look at pixel fonts

[jbladeus]

as dubbya said.
You need to set antialiasing to none. Use antialiasing for sizes 10 points and above otherwise the text will always become blurry and illegible.