Inkscape

We got our first Macs at the beginning of last year and in that time I haven't worked on too many webdesign projects and most that I have worked on have been based around fairly consistent web safe colours.

However for our latest project I've been working on a lovely sand coloured background tile with a Moroccan pattern I created in Inkscape, anyway, it turns out on Windows computers this looks grey instead of sand coloured.

We specifically chose Macs because we really wanted the quality of color and contrast that you get with them, yet Windows machines aren't able to faithfully reproduce those rich colours.

So, there is an easy fix, on your mac create a new user profile in System Preferences, then adjust the gamma number from 1.8 to 2.2 in that user so you can test colours for web projects; or even use it to create the original artwork.

Here's a link to another site that tells you how to change the colour preferences<>.

This is exciting, the X11 package for Mac Os X Leopard has been updated again. The latest version (2.2.3) was released yesterday and adds even more stability than 2.2.1 which I hope is going to make Inkscape more reliable.

Versions prior to 2.2.1 of X11 were incredibly unstable, it kept crashing and losing any changes that I'd made to Inkscape documents. Version 2.2.1 fixed those but I still have trouble installing fonts, and an annoying bug which leaves horrible white squares all over my desktop somehow got introduced.

So when I saw that v2.2.3 has been released you can imagine my excitement. The really strange thing is that I never used to get excited about things like this but I can really see how the whole free software world is coming together now.

I see that a lot of font files have been changed so I'm looking forward to seeing if this fixes the problem of Inkscape not being able to see all fonts installed on my Mac, or whether these are just updates.

If you want to take Inkscape for a test drive, you'll need X11, and if you're running Leopard you probably won't have X11 installed, so take a little advice, don't install the version of X11 shipped on your Mac disk, simply go and get the current XQuartz version then install Inkscape.

Since I first started using Inkscape I've been practising with different techniques and the image above is one of the results. A variant of this image has also been used on Carl's website.

This was my first project in Inkscape to test the software. For the last few years I've had Adobe Illustrator on my windows machine, however I never got the chance to use it. Now that I have a MacBook Pro I can't be bothered spending several hundred Euros for the OSX version, so now I am Inkscape girl. For this experiment I wanted an image that I could easily trace and use as the bones of my drawing.

My inspirational muse was a photograph of a coffee cup that I imported as a new layer. This acted as my template for the drawing. Using the bezier tool I traced around the different sections of the cup and assigned them to different layers. Assigning each section of the cup to a new layer makes it easier to fill in later.

Tracing the cup was the easy part, after all a cup is just a cup, but colouring it in...

This is where I have my biggest challenge with Inkscape. For my first project I wanted to play with gradients, because I had been struggling with the gradient stop system.
My coffee cup has the advantage of only having a few solid blocks to be filled, meaning I could focus my energies on learning to use the gradients properly. I hope you all like it.