Hi all, I’m not really one for blogging but someone recently told me that it is an important overall part of having a “good social media presence”, which to be honest always feels a little disingenuous to me. However, on reflection I do think that it might be a nice idea to maybe talk a little about my work, what I use and how I create. I have been asked on a few occasions about the work I do and this might provide a simple resource for those that are interested. In the coming months I am hoping to create some tutorials and youtube videos to go along with them, I’m also hoping to cover various design trends and talk a little about some of my work.
But first Inkscape…
So Inkscape then… Ahh where to start with Inkscape. Inkscape is an opensource, free, professional SVG editor. SVG, if you don’t know, is scalable vector graphics (I’ll talk more about this in another post). Which sounds great until you are using it. Inkscape is plagued by a few problems, quite a few in fact, these mostly seem to come from the fact it is open source and feels absolutely nowhere near finished.
I don’t want to feel like I am beating up on a piece of software, especially one that is free to use. Inkscape does work and it is possible to work on it (I have been using it for the last few weeks). It’s just that it always feels like you are fighting against it. It’s kind of hard to describe but after years of using Adobe’s Illustrator using Inkscape is like trying to create through a thick layer of tar. It suffers from the same problems that I have found with most open source software, the UI is bad (maybe not bad but counter intuitive after using adobe), the software feels slow or sluggish which I can only assume is an optimisation issue, and overall it feels like a work in progress (which it is).
I do feel that maybe in a couple of versions Inkscape could possibly be as good as Illustrator, perhaps that’s why I find it so frustrating, it’s really close to being good but isn’t quite there. For now it certainly does in a pinch, it even has a few features that I wish Adobe had. With Inkscape I can still generate work to the same quality I was producing before but I feel as though I am spending about double the amount of time getting to that point.
The biggest problem I had was with a weird compatibility issue Inkscape has in Windows 7. It simply put wouldn’t even run if there were any fonts installed which had special characters, I’m a designer, most people using Inkscape would be designers, designers are notorious for our font collections. I have more fonts than I can count and there was no way I was going to go through all of them to see which had special characters and might be causing the conflict. Fortunately my Girlfriend is a web developer so we have a number of computers around the house and I was able to install Inkscape with no problems on a Windows 8 machine as well as on the Mac. However I prefer to design on the Windows 7 machine as it has by far the most powerful graphics processor in the house. I can’t imagine how this couldn’t have been a deal breaker if we only had the one computer.
In closing I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be using Inkscape for, I find it clunky and it’s definitely slowing down my workflow. But at the same time I’m going to be keeping my eye on it, it is very close to perhaps being a replacement to Illustrator once it’s bugs have been worked out. For now though I would find it very hard to recommend in its current state beyond perhaps as an oddity.
VP Design 