About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc
About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc
We are who we are. It’s hard to break with what we know. I saw this idea somewhere, and wanted to pay a little Inkscape homage to the idea. Cause we’re all potatoes in one way or another, and potatoes gonna potate. Tomatoes gonna tomate. Haters gonna hate.
Inkscape makes for a great visual organizer. By creating circular icons from all of my most active social media services via clipping with circles, then using the connector tool to connect them in specific ways, you can see that I use my Android based phone to generate a lot of content that is dispersed in lots of ways, and that most of my content gets directed to FriendFeed, a social media aggregator, which then funnels into Twitter, then Facebook. I wonder, how do you do social media, and how would you show me?
Okay, so those of you who know me on Facebook know I like Foursquare, the geolocation microblogging app. I also like Android, the phone OS from Google, which has a cool barcode scanning capability. I’m fond of QR codes, which are square barcodes that you can encode URLs, paragraphs, and other strings of text. Bring it all together, and you have a way to scan a barcode to check in to Foursquare. I use an app for scanning to Foursquare called PhiSq available in the Android Market for free. I also use a free site to generate QRCodes from the Foursquare Venue URLs at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ — copy and paste the Venue URL into the form, and voila: a QRcode that you can import into Inkscape. However, Inkscape has its own barcode generators in the extensions, and I’m sure they would work with the scanner as well.
I imported them into Inkscape, placed them in a grid, with explanatory text, and printed them out. I’m thinking about taping these to the back of my laptop, though you could get the scan right from the screen where you’re reading this. Although, unless you’re also on Rider’s campus, you’ll have a heck of a time getting any points or badges for the checkin.
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!
A set of monograms for friends by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #typography
A set of monograms for friends by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #typography
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:
Using the text tool, type the first and last initial and highlight them both
Using the font dialog, flip through each font until the right font shows up. The right font is one that properly represents the subject, provides an interesting way to connect the letters, creates an interesting shape, and is visually attractive.
After the font is chosen, you can use the kerning features of the text tool (alt plus arrows when you have the cursor inserted) to move the letterforms into the perfect relationship.
If there is any part of your font that you don’t care for (I don’t like dots on the letter i, generally) you can use the select tool to select and convert the text into a path (shift-ctrl-c) and then ungroup the text (ctrl-u) in order to work with the letterforms independently and also use the node editor to directly manipulate the text turned paths.
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.
