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

Exploring the Inset, Outset, and Dynamic Offset Path operations

Thus far, we’ve been learning ways to combine and break apart paths, but what if we want to expand a path outward some distance? We can do this easily with a circle just by holding Ctrl + Shift while scaling. For more complex geometry, we quickly get overlapping portions, since the shape is scaled relative to the center of the shape, and not evenly on all sides. Figure 6.22 shows the result of duplicating and scaling operations on a circle versus more complex shapes:

Figure 6.22 – The result of duplicating and scaling shapes

Figure 6.22 – The result of duplicating and scaling shapes

As you can see, the circle works reasonably well, but as soon as there’s any variation in the shape, we run into problems. Take the rectangle, for example – it’s also a simple shape, but as we scale it down uniformly, the top and bottom scale down faster than the sides.

Finally, in the case of the mushroom-like shape on the far right...