This is a portfolio of my work in many forms. It should give you some insight as to the products I might help you to create.
This is a note of thanks to my new friends that I met and worked with in the Inkscape sessions at Princeton Public Library over the last five weeks. Special thanks to Janie Hermann and Janice Painter for helping to make it happen and keep it going. This was the subject of our last exercise, and we had a lot of fun with it. Thanks again, all!
So here is another monogram study for a very good friend and regular contributor to this project, Shannon. Shannon is bright, kind, inventive, cool, smart, technologically proficient, creative, and a lot of fun to be around. In short, she’s amazing. I wanted to capture some of her qualities in these monograms. Hope you liked it, and thanks to Shannon for asking for it!
I’ve received a strong response of interest (maybe jealousy?) in the “friend monograms” sketches, and I’m saying right here that if you ask for one, I’ll make every effort to make you one, or in this case, 12. I think letterforms and their relationship are art. I got a lot of help from fontographers on these, but the kerning, custom nodes, placement and relationship, etc., is mine. Thanks for asking, Dan! That’s what this project is all about.
This is a public note to the renowned librarian and leader Peter Bromberg who was one of the original pillars of the Library blog Library Garden. He recently announced his amicable departure from the blog as an author. Peter invited me to join the blog about a year ago as a sometime author, and has (along with Janie Hermann) sparked most of my success in the New Jersey Library presentation circuit. I’m quite sad he’s leaving the blog, but I poked a bit of fun here because I’m not as a sad as I might be if I was likely to see Peter less. The fact is that he’s now working in Princeton, which means I’m more likely to see him now than ever. Cheers to you, Peter, and thanks for all the great work you’ve done and continue to do.
So this was inspired by the recent sketch of my longtime monogram as well as a conversation with Sarah Badawy about how some combinations of letters work better than others. In order to do each of these, I went through the same workflow in Inkscape each time:
You can do it. You can also extend this methodology to any string of text to make logos, wordmarks, and text based art and design.
Yes, Inkscape is primarily a vector based editor, but I use bitmap or raster based images in it all the time. Inkscape gives you the ability to work in a light way with bitmaps but makes it more difficult to paint into, alter, erase, etc. with bitmaps, unless you do a bitmap trace. In this case, I imported my image, and set it in layer one. Then I imported another image of some rust into layer 2, and set that layer to mode: darken, and brought the opacity down a bit. Finally, I imported the third image, a kind of tech looking checkerboard, and applied the same mode, darken, and lowered the opacity. This is one example of how the layers menu can be really useful in Inkscape, where it is essential inside photo manipulation apps like the GIMP.