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

Introducing shapes in Inkscape

In this section, we’ll introduce you to shape concepts. We’ll begin with the basics of raster images (made of pixels) versus vector images (made of geometric shapes), drawing shapes, and then styling shapes with Fill and Stroke.

Raster versus vector images

Have a look at the two shapes in Figure 2.1. Both are the Inkscape logo, but they are different. The image on the right is called a raster image. It’s nothing more than a grid of pixels, each of a specific color that makes up the image. You can tell this because when you zoom in, you can see the jagged edges of the pixels:

Figure 2.1 – Inkscape logo in vector and raster formats

Figure 2.1 – Inkscape logo in vector and raster formats

In contrast, the image on the left is a vector graphic – that is, it’s made up of points (also called nodes), and lines connecting them. Instead of storing and displaying pixels of this graphic, your computer can re-draw a vector graphic each time you...