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

Understanding the Objects and Layers dialog

Inkscape starts you out with one layer called Layer 1. If we start a brand new file in Inkscape and call up the Objects and Layers dialog by choosing Object > Objects and Layers… we get a mostly empty dialog containing an item called Layer 1, as shown in Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 – Calling up the Layers and Objects dialog

Figure 11.1 – Calling up the Layers and Objects dialog

By default, Inkscape will add objects to Layer 1. You can think of it as a group containing all of your objects and object groups. As of Inkscape 1.1, this dialog will also show you each object you create.

We can see this if we draw an object (in our case, a circle) onto our blank canvas; Inkscape will add an entry item indented under Layer 1 to show that it’s been added to that layer, as shown in Figure 11.2.

Figure 11.2 – Newly drawn object shown in the Layers and Objects dialog

Figure 11.2 – Newly drawn object shown in the Layers and Objects dialog

You can see that the current layer is highlighted...