Today I came in intent on rewriting my internal web apps so they didn’t use frames. See, I’ve been migrating people from the custom Visual BASIC apps to the web-based equivalents I’ve been writing, and they’ve been such a success people are starting to print them out. And sometimes they get the report, and sometimes the navigation frame. So I was going to off the navigation frame.
Never got the chance. In advance of some shows coming up really soon, I was drafted to help with a few flyers and make a new postcard.
The task: Take the postcard idea above, remove all the text and the dress back-view, add a pattern to it, blow it up to 6.25″ x 4″ size, and make it look professional. In two hours.
Here’s the result:
I couldn’t have done it without Inkscape. I imported the “idea” into Inkscape, broke apart the three dresses I was keeping, and traced them from bitmaps to a series of shapes. I collected the dress parts together and the skin parts together, grew them to an appropriate size (Inkscape objects can be grown or shrunk as much as possible without losing resolution), imported the logo I had done before, fiddled with the background, turned a fuzzy JPEG of the skirt pattern into an Inkscape pattern and colored the dresses/skirts with it, et voila, done and on time.
I was going to redraw the dress pattern in Inkscape, but I ran out of time, so had to use the fuzzy JPEG.
Inkscape is rapidly becoming my favorite open-source drawing program.
Probably this seems horribly off-topic to you all. I think the number of people who work in the fashion industry and play MMOs is pretty close to one. But I really wanted to get the word out about Inkscape. For something that costs nothing, it gets the job done.
Ohhh, Inkscape is available for OS X. I might give it a whirl. Not that I have any professional use for it, but I do love to play. 😉 Cute dresses/skirt too.
I do wish Inkscape used the base O/S for their UI. Like, use the Windows file save box on Windows; the Gnome one for Gnome; KDE one for KDE etc. I really dislike how Open Office 2, Inkscape and other cross-platform apps run in their own little worlds that only work slowly with everything else.
Other than that, I like it!