InkScape - A Great Free Illustration Software Tool Download

Would you like a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator or Coreldraw? If so, I think I have found a great download for you.

This week I have been working on logos and other graphical bits and pieces for client websites. Now, I am not a graphic designer, but I do get called on to do this kind of thing, mostly tweaks and making sure elements fit where they need to go.

My tool of choice is the cut-down Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. It does pretty much everything I need. But Photoshop is a bitmap paint tool, a photo editor as the name suggests. When you need to edit illustrations you need to work with “vectors”, files that are made up of points and lines.

I wasn’t about to buy Adobe Illustrator for a one-off task. Thankfully the open source community has really come along in leaps and bounds, the software tools the free software folks produce is as feature complete and powerful as commercial software, so I knew there would be an option out there. Just check out the mainstay alternatives of the common business software choices:

It wasn’t much of a search to be honest, almost immediately I found InkScape, and what a tool it is!

As you can see from the screen shot below, it is exactly what you would expect from an illustration application, allowing you to edit lines, fills, nodes. Also you will see that on my Mac I am running the X11 windowing system to load the software.

Inkscape

You can download the software for free from the Inkscape site. Everything installs easily, just like any other desktop application.

In use it can be quite quirky, for example it took me a few tries to work out graduated fills, but that is only to be expected from open source software as the volunteers who work on these tools like to spend time on the glamor or glory jobs, not making it easy to use!

I am so happy I found Inkscape, I am sure it would make a great addition to your software tool collection too.

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools

Comments

7 Responses to “InkScape - A Great Free Illustration Software Tool Download”

  1. worldofhiglet on November 6th, 2008 5:46 pm

    This is a great find! Thanks for sharing.

  2. Tony Scott on November 6th, 2008 5:48 pm

    Have used InkScape, GIMP and OpenOffice.org for years - all excellant and open source.

    MySQL is, of course, one of the components of the LAMP stack - a bedrock of Web 2.0.

  3. Kim Woodbridge on November 6th, 2008 7:13 pm

    Thanks Chris!

    I’ve been using OpenOffice and Gimp but didn’t know about InksScape. Open source and free is always the best :-)

  4. pratap Chowdary on November 6th, 2008 9:20 pm

    Yes, I believe in open source as they are designed to be best.. as the utility will be more

  5. Roland Gesthuizen on November 7th, 2008 7:03 am

    Chris, this is a great tool. Currently I enjoy teaching it to my year 7 and year 11 Information Technology students. We particularly like what can be done using the trace-bitmap function to generate your own artwork from a photograph.

  6. Antonio on November 7th, 2008 11:58 am

    Hi, great to see you’re liking Inkscape! Was just wondering have you used Inkscape for print work? I’ve done a bit of digital imagery with it but haven’t seen how that translates to print.

  7. Chris Garrett on November 7th, 2008 2:39 pm

    @Roland - I will have to try that feature, would be excellent when clients give me bitmap logos

    @Antonio - So far only graphics for web but I will be trying it out :)

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