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

Try it yourself

In this exercise, we’re going to use a few of the many path effects to make a quick logo for an imaginary chainmail jewelry company. We will then stack some more path effects to make the logo appear as if it’s on a flag, waving in the wind, as shown in Figure 12.12.

Figure 12.12 – The logo and flag for Five Rings Chainmail Jewelry

Figure 12.12 – The logo and flag for Five Rings Chainmail Jewelry

Normally, this would be a pretty big task, but with path effects, we can have our logo sorted in no time! Let’s start with the rings:

  1. We can just make a single circle, with a thick stroke, and then choose Path > Path Effects… to call up our trusty Path Effects dialog. We then hit the + button to add a Rotate copies path effect, changing Number of copies from the default of 6 to 5, as shown in Figure 12.13.

Figure 12.13 – Adding a Rotate copies path effect and changing the number of copies

Figure 12.13 – Adding a Rotate copies path effect and changing the number of copies

  1. This gives us our five...