Smoothing Text Edges

[MarkW]

Hello,

I'm sort of a noobie to PS, but I'm improving by the day.

I'm designing a logo for a website, and I want to make a really good, high res version of it in case it might be used later. This is what I have so far:

http://people.virginia.edu/~mww5x/logo.gif

My question is basically, how can I smooth the edges of the text so it doesn't appear "shaky" and instead appears professional and clean? This was originally a much smaller image, so it took me a good deal of time to get a larger version to appear fairly accurate.

I guess also I'd like to know if anyone has any suggestions regarding how to make the whole thing look more professional. I was thinking about making the whole thing shiny or glossy or whatever you want to call it. I can't change the structure of the logo, but I can change small things about it (ie, shading, slight color variations, whatever).

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated!

[joshcxa]

Best application to build logos in is illustrator. This way it will be vector and will scale to any size.

You can make nice smooth curves quite easily in photoshop with the pen tool. Try tracing what you have there with it but obviously dont trace around the bumps, smooth it out.

[MarkW]

Can someone tell me what to do when I've (attempted to) trace the shape with the pen tool? I'm just not sure what I'm doing.

[MarkW]

This is what I have at this point.

http://people.virginia.edu/~mww5x/logo2.gif

I have a few more questions...I need to make the background inside the ellipse white, and make the outside of the circle blue. However, when I do this with the paint bucket tool, it takes away the effects I've added like shadow and emboss, etc. How can I do this while maintaining the effects?

Also, my next steps are to try to make this look "shiny." I've looked at some of the "shiny button" tutorials on various sites, but this seems to me to be a bit more complicated...

Any help would be appreciated!

[therealmrbob]

throw some bevel over the text it should look good o and you can use gausian blur on the text (not too much just a lil bit) to straitn it out