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

What is a Path Effect, and why is it live?

In graphic design, when we talk about making shapes, edits to photos, and so on, there are two kinds of routes we can take to get what we want – destructive and non-destructive. Simply put, a destructive workflow means that once we do something to a shape, it’s done, and cannot be reversed (except for for a short time by the Undo function).

For example, when we use our Boolean operations (by selecting Path > Difference) to subtract a square from a circle, we make a new shape made of nodes, lines, and curves. Thus, the circle and square are destroyed to make the new shape and are no longer editable separately.

If we then wanted to move the square without moving the circle parts, we’re pretty much out of luck. We would be better off drawing a new circle and square and then combining them again in the same way.

A non-destructive workflow is different; if we take that same circle and square, add a Boolean path...