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’ll do a complete vectorization of a logo. You can choose one from the internet for practice, or you can use the Seedling Jewelers logo provided in the practice materials for this chapter.

The process will be the same for most logos; just make sure that the logo you choose is high-quality, typically at least 1,000 x 1,000 px to preserve crisp corners and accurate curves. You can work with lower-resolution logos, but the results will need more cleanup using the Node tool to manually tweak your geometry:

  1. Import your bitmap logo to the canvas using File > Import, or drag it to Inkscape from your filesystem.
  2. We will then call up the Trace Bitmap dialog by choosing Path > Trace Bitmap. We will choose the Single scan tab and select Brightness cutoff from the Detection mode dropdown. With our bitmap image selected, we should see a preview, as shown in Figure 14.14.
Figure 14.14 – The Trace Bitmap dialog with a preview of the logo trace

Figure 14.14 – The Trace...