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

What are Booleans?

Boolean is a term that spans the graphic design, math, and logic fields of study. In graphic design, it’s a way to take two (or more) shapes and use them to create a new shape with a path operation. For example, we may want to take a circle and a square and merge them to make a new shape.

We can do this by making a square using the Rectangle tool, and a circle using the Circle tool, and then choosing Union from the Path menu, as shown in Figure 6.1:

Figure 6.1 – Performing a Union operation on a circle and square

Figure 6.1 – Performing a Union operation on a circle and square

There are currently six Boolean operations in Inkscape, which are as follows:

  • Union: Adds/merges shapes together
  • Difference: Takes the top shape and subtracts it from the bottom shape
  • Intersection: Takes two (or more) shapes and only leaves the intersecting parts
  • Exclusion: Takes two (or more) shapes and cuts out the intersecting parts, leaving the non-intersecting parts
  • Division: Takes...