As an Art Director/Designer, I’ve done thousands of logos, and the software I use is Ticonderoga 2.0…
Be careful-- logos are drawn on a computer (93% of them in Adobe Illustrator), but they’re *designed *with a pencil and paper.
Every time I jump on the computer before I work things out on paper, I can tell. The solutions are too easy, the lines too inorganic.
I’ve used the GIMP and Inkscape for years. I am not a professional designer, but use them to support the needs of several small business… i.e. web sites, print posters, logo creation, flyers, etc.
Inkscape is a great free SVG tool that I’ve never had too much trouble with. You can download it for free and try it right now: http://www.inkscape.org/ .
The GIMP is a good open source raster graphic editor. It is a bit unintuitive, but depending on what you are doing, doing some Googling to figure it out versus spending $1000+ dollars might be a good value proposition for you. The major drawback of the GIMP is that it does not support CMYK (as previously mentioned). So, if you are going to do print work, that does become a challenge when trying to select colors. I get around it be having a super old version of Photoshop that I specifically use just for converting GIMP files to the CMYK color space and doing some adjustments. You can get it here: http://www.gimp.org/
For the record, I’ve done some fairly complex things, and there is nothing I haven’t been able to do on these two packages. It’s like all open source software… what is more valuable to you: your time or your money?
Grandma/eggs/sucking.
Get over yourself.