Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

By : Christopher Rogers
1 (1)
Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

1 (1)
By: Christopher Rogers

Overview of this book

With the power and versatility of the Inkscape software, making charts, diagrams, illustrations, and UI mockups with infinite resolution becomes enjoyable. If you’re looking to get up to speed with vector illustration in no time, this comprehensive guide has got your back! Design Made Easy with Inkscape is easy to follow and teaches you everything you need to know to create graphics that you can use and reuse forever, for free! You’ll benefit from the author’s industry experience as you go over the basics of vector illustration, discovering tips and tricks for getting professional graphics done fast by leveraging Inkscape's powerful toolset. This book teaches by example, using a great variety of use cases from icons and logos to illustration, web design, and product design. You’ll learn about hotkeys and take a best-practices approach developed over ten years of using Inkscape as a design tool in production. What’s more, this book also includes links to free graphics resources that you can use in all your projects. Whether you’re a new user or a professional, by the end of this book, you’ll have full understanding of how to use Inkscape and its myriad of excellent features to make stunning graphics for your projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Finding Your Way Around
7
Part 2: Advanced Shape Editing
13
Part 3: Inkscape’s Power Tools

The Gradient tool

Gradients are color transitions. For example, we may want our shape to be black on the right, transparent on the left, and have a smooth blending of both between. Let’s explore this scenario by first drawing a black rectangle. We will then select the Gradient tool, click and hold where we want our black to start, then drag to where we want it to be fully transparent. Figure 8.1 shows this process and the resulting gradient.

Figure 8.1 – Using the Gradient tool to make a black-to-transparent gradient

Figure 8.1 – Using the Gradient tool to make a black-to-transparent gradient

Note that after we’ve drawn that gradient, we can click and drag the handles to move the gradient around. Not only that, the gradient doesn’t need to be completely inside the confines of our shape. For example, Figure 8.2 shows what happens when we move the gradient end nodes outside the shape.

Figure 8.2 – Moving the transparent end node outside the shape

Figure 8.2 – Moving the transparent end node outside the shape

You can see that no...