Zeta-Puppis.com » Graphic

LinuxDay 2006: the (two) week after

kratorius — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:44:42 +0000

So the LinuxDay is gone this year too… It has been an amazing experience, I talked about inkscape at 50-60 people. And most of them were really interested in what I was saying, and this is a real miracle :)

By the way, if you want to have a look at my slides, you can find them at http://lugbari.org/bin/view/Main/LinuxDay2006, next to my presentation’s title: “Inkscape: grafica vettoriale su Linux”.

Reboot the homepage

kratorius — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:45:53 +0000

Usually works in this way: you open the home page of your site and you’re tired of seeing always the same graphic and the same layout. Then you want to do a redesign but this rarely happens, since it requires a lot of time and you don’t have enough.
The question is: does this redesign is really needed? 95% of it doesn’t.

Doing the redesign of your own site requires big efforts both in time and in money terms, since from time to time, when you’re the developer of yourself, you never know when you really done the work. This happens, at least to me, very often. I do a site, then after two or three weeks I would to redesign it since its layout just bored me.

The matter is that many times this work is unneeded and undesidered. It’s not rare to see some very nice and original design disappear after not so much time because the author decided its time to burn the old design and to do another one.

This wordpress.com hosting doesn’t allow to change the css (if you don’t pay a15$ fee), so the problem doesn’t exists for this blog, but exists for many other sites I have.

So, what do you think about this? Is this just a my own problem or it is a wider one?

Using inkscape to design a phone receiver

kratorius — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 11:27:00 +0000

Yesterday I had to design a new logo for a product that’s going to be launched on the market by a friend of mine. Since it was a VoIP-related service, I thought that the logo could include something like a phone receiver.
I can’t show you the logo itself, since the product hasn’t yet been launched, so let see this post like an inkscape tutorial where I explain how to design a phone receiver. Maybe, when the product will be ready, I’ll made an entire tutorial about the logo design.

The first thing we need is an image that we’ll use as model. I used the image you can see on the right.

Note that’s a PNG with an alpha channel, so Internet Explorer users could have problems to see it. It’s not important, by the way, to have a perfect shaped model.
So, open inkscape, create a 400x400px document (File->Document Preferences->Custom Canvas) and then import the model (File->Import…).

After this, create a rectangle (press F4 or click on the rectangle icon) that has, more or less, the same size of the image and put it under the model (if it goes over, press PgDown to put it down).

Create another rectangle and cross it with the other rectangle in this way:

Then select both the rectangles and press Ctrl + - or click on Path->Difference. In this way you should get something like this:

Now, by keeping selected the resulting rectangle, edit it as a path by using the path transformer tools (press F2 or click on the icon on the toolbar).
Select the upper and bottom left corners (hold shift pressed to select both), then add three new nodes by clicking twice on . Then select the internal nodes (the nodes that should stay withing the phone receiver) and add a new node. You should get something like this:

Now select all the left-side nodes and make selected nodes smooth by clicking on the right icon ). Then move the nodes near the model shape to have something that has more or less the same shape. In the end, you should have this:

Now move the model away (keep it near the shape you created now to use it as a reference). Now, make smooth all the remaining nodes and try to model them using the lines that appear when you select them in order to have something like this:

A tip: for the internal nodes, keep that lines really shorter in order to have just a rounded corner. If you need more precision, add new nodes where you think you need them (I added other two nodes on the top and on the bottom of the phone receiver).

So now remove the model and you’ll have your phone receiver ready to be used!