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

Making custom filters

Say, instead of a drop shadow, we’d like a filter that automatically shades the interior of one side of our shapes so that they look 3D instead of 2D. We can start with a new file and draw a plain circle, and then choose Filters > Filter Editor (with the circle still selected).

We are presented with a blank space and a familiar looking + button at the top. Click the + button, and also tick the Filter checkbox so that we can see the result of our filter. As you can see from Figure 13.4, this makes the circle vanish!

Figure 13.4 – Adding a filter and activating it with the checkbox makes the circle vanish

Figure 13.4 – Adding a filter and activating it with the checkbox makes the circle vanish

This makes sense though when you think about it; we’ve told Inkscape to filter the circle and give it nothing as a recipe, so it gives us nothing back! We could actually use this as a vanish effect if we really wanted to, but we already have Object > Hide.

Let’s move along to adding our first...