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

Resizing shapes

With a freshly drawn rectangle (or another object), when you click on the Select and Transform tool, you will notice handles at the corners change to resizing arrows. Grabbing these will allow you to resize the shape or shapes you have selected. Note that holding the Ctrl key while dragging a handle will preserve the aspect ratio of the shape in much the same way as it does when you are drawing shapes.

This means, for example, if you resize a square, it will stay a square rather than distort into a rectangle, as shown in Figure 2.19:

Figure 2.19 – Dragging resize handles to resize in the direction indicated by the arrow handles

Figure 2.19 – Dragging resize handles to resize in the direction indicated by the arrow handles

This is far from the only way to resize shapes! Let’s explore a few more useful options, shall we?

Resizing the height and width values with the Select and Transform tool

You may have noticed the height (H) and width (W) values in the Tool control bar when you have a shape selected (see Figure...