This logo is a digital photograph of a bit of hand printing that I did some years ago. The original photograph is pretty horrible:

Out of focus, badly lit, in false perspective because the camera wasn't held with the lens parallel to the poster and in exactly the centre. Horrible.

So I put it into Photoshop, and played with it. I sharpened the edges (whatever that means), and messed with the contrast and brightness, and got this:

The colours are starting to look quite nice, though their relation to real life is rather distant. Then I thought the thing to do was to exaggerate the false perspective, which I thought might give it a kind of extra weariness...

Which it does. But creates a nasty white gap. Therefore, move the quote into the middle, so:

What you can then do, I found, after much trial and error, is turn the background into a blend, graduating from one selected colour, the actual orange-russet on the left of the perspective image, to another, the yellow-gold on the right, with the direction of the blend reversed. (I do hope your browser is doing justice to these colours: if they're not as I describe them, go find a Macintosh.) It's a lot easier to do than it is to describe. Then put a box round it, scale it down a bit to make a logo out of it, and there you are:

The point of all this is not to celebrate the wonderfulness of this logo, or my genius in creating it: the point is that yes, it is quite nice, but no, I'm not a genius, but an amateur who blundered around for half an hour and then was rather shocked at the quite nice object that revealed itself. The genius is all in the program.

And this is the real point. Computer programs are designed by very very clever people who want to sell as many copies as possible. There are vastly more fumbling amateurs out there than there are trained graphic designers. Therefore the programs are designed for the rest of us, in order to help us, as painlessly as possible, pass ourselves off as knowing how to make nice images. If I can do it, so can you.