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

The Spiral tool

Every once in a great while, you may want to make a spiral. Well, your go-to for that sort of thing is the Spiral tool, whose Tool control bar options are shown in Figure 3.18:

Figure 3.18 – The Spiral tool and associated controls in the Tool control bar

Figure 3.18 – The Spiral tool and associated controls in the Tool control bar

The Turns Spin Box controls how many times the spiral goes around the midpoint (revolutions), while the Divergence Spin Box determines the rate at which the spiral grows between revolutions. That is to say that the spiral gap starts smaller toward the center and grows larger the farther out you go (as you would see in a nautilus shell, for example).

You can see examples of turns and divergence in Figure 3.19:

Figure 3.19 – Increasing the Turns value (left) and increasing the Divergence value (right)

Figure 3.19 – Increasing the Turns value (left) and increasing the Divergence value (right)

Dragging the handles lets you manually adjust where the start and end points reside along the spiral.

There are also some handy modifier keys...