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 Align and Distribute dialog

If I may draw your attention to the Align and Distribute dialog, which can be summoned by choosing Object > Align and Distribute or by hitting the magic Ctrl + Shift + A hotkey combination, as shown in Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1 – The Align and Distribute dialog

Figure 4.1 – The Align and Distribute dialog

Here, we have a lot of options, but if you look closely at each of the icons, you will see they do exactly what they indicate – the Align section aligns all selected shapes together, while the Distribute section equalizes the spaces between shapes in different ways.

Let’s start with the Align section and see some practical examples.

Say you have a building and some window washers. You’d like to align the window washers to the side of the building so that they aren’t floating out over the street, menacing people with a clear defiance of gravity.

Figure 4.2 shows this scenario and some ways we might use the core Align buttons...