This post is going to rough for a few days, I have PT twice a week now for my ear, so that is going to hamper my work on projects and the website for a few months. But if it fixes my problem all the better!
Some time ago, I posted on the Alan Wake forums asking for help in creating a good logo. I got some great ideas, but at the time I could not even draw a stick figure. My professors were always so agitated with my drawing ability when I was taking architecture, but I was always good with the actual design of the house. Today many great programs exist that help architects of today, this post will date me a bit, but AutoCad was just barely out of DOS.
For the programmer, many tools exist that are great, and some are free. My personal favorites at this point are Corel Draw, Painter 11, ArtRage 2.5, Gimp, Blender, and Paint.net. For my animated logo I used a combination of Corel Draw and Paint.net. At first I was looking at animating the logo with a wmv - using Windows Movie Maker and then Live Movie Maker. In the end I used tiled sprite sheets, and just a few lines of code to get it all running. Here are my early examples with using movie maker. I ended up using nearly 170 frames for the around 9 second splash logo. First logo used Movie Maker, second used Live Movie Maker and includes sound (audio by Daniel Gooding).
Edit: more to come shortly. I will post the code I used to animate the tiled sprite sheets, and a few more early videos.
XNA Tutorials 
