The New Love of My Life
I wrote previously that I was playing around with creating a logo in Gimp. I see now the error of my ways. It's just not the right tool for the job. I still love Gimp, I'm just not in love with Gimp. A vector graphics program is what I need. I feel stupid in hindsight, not seeing the relationship was all wrong. This new thing I've got going on has made life richer. Behold, Inkscape! My next true software love.
I won't bother trying to do a full feature list (since I know around three of them), but it's definitely worth you looking into if you want to do something more like graphics / logo creation rather than photo retouching (still love ya, Gimp).
It's got a graphic import / convert to paths piece of functionality that I just can't get over. The laurel leaves in the logo above got lifted from a gif I found on the web. It took somewhere under a minute to import it, convert it, isolate just the leaves, and paste them into their own layer as an object. You can also view the XML version of the "image." All too good to be true? Well, it's also open source. I think I just came a little. Oh, and you can get it for Windows if you're into that sort of BDSM thing.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Yeah, I love Inkscape too. The other great thing about using it for logos and other designs is that since it's svg, you can export it to whatever size of bitmap you want without fiddling with resolution and pixelation.
ps – the link to inkscape in your post doesn't point to inkscape.org. I think it points to your previous post.
Cheers.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Thanks. The link's been fixed.
March 23rd, 2007 at 1:02 am
Can you post a step by step guide on how you made the logo. It looks awesome.
Thanks!
March 24th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I'm glad you like it. I hate most of my own attempts especially when compared to what real graphic artists can do. I hadn't really considered a step by step guide as it was so insanely easy with Inkscape.
It's just made a set of concentric circles by duplicating the one outer circle and changing the radius ("Ctrl+(" I think) and changing the stroke style (Ctrl+F to bring up that dialog). You then just need to make sure that you align the centers of all of the circles.
The trick with the text is to create an invisible circle and wrap the text to the curve (that's under the text menu). You can then adjust the location of the text independent of the visible circles. I also had to reverse the path of the invisible circle to get the text to appear on the outside of the curve rather than the inside. Finally, you can rotate the invisible curve to position the text (make sure you aligned all the centers again, it seems to get off if you're not careful). I just eyeballed this.
The two objects in the middle were found using Google Image Search. After finding a gif/jpg/bmp I imported it into Inkscape and converted to paths using the built in tool (Shift+Alt+B). I had to play around a bit to get what I wanted. After deleting the paths I didn't care about I had two black and white objects of laurel leaves and the caduceus. After that it was just playing with positioning and colors (although the posted image is still in black and white).
The only other tip is that whenever I have problems getting a path from an image I use Gimp to simplify the image before tracing. Usually this just consists of reducing color depth or using the find edges filter in Gimp.
Hopefully that helps get you started. I highly recommend the built in tutorials that are built into Inkscape (which I'm still going through). They're really well done.
April 2nd, 2007 at 12:16 am
The only thing missing now is an open source variant of Flash. *Wrings hands* Then i am like long gone from the windows world.
April 27th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Hey Simmons – I added your blof to my roll. We homies now…
April 27th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Very nice. Although, most of my funny stuff is on another blog. It's in a claim comment somewhere…