Using spiro splines in Inkscape

Spiro web design tutorial

This tutorial will focus on a new feature in Inkscape version .47 called spiro splines.

This is a simple technique and might be a bit of a stretch to consider as an actual tutorial. At any rate this is a fun tool with a lot of possible uses. Grab a copy of Inkscape if you don’t have one already and let’s get started.

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Sugar Labs Activities

We’re designing the activities download portal for Sugar Labs.

This is a fork of Mozilla’s open-source web application, AMO (which is short for addons.mozilla.org) which they built as an add-on manager for Firefox and Thunderbird. The Sugar Labs team has forked this project to manage activity downloads for the XO laptop.

We actually finished this the design and front-end development for this project back in June. However, shortly after its launch Mozilla released a significant redesign of their AMO app which has a lot of cool features that we’re now working on incorporating for Sugar Activites.

We’re designing this site in-browser, so here’s a preview of what it will look like soon.

sugar labs website design project

UPDATE: Now online at http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ and 9,676,899 activities have been downloaded from the services as of 10/26/2013.

Designing professional websites with Linux

Most web design companies and professionals do the majority of their work using either Windows or OS X. The primary reason for this, I argue, is that the industry standard tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks only run (natively) on these platforms. For many professionals using Linux as a primary platform for creating websites just isn’t even considered. Nevertheless, using open-source tools on Linux to design and develop websites is becoming more popular for many different reasons. In this article I’ll take a look at why Linux and it’s open-source programs are gaining steam, as well as address some of the challenges designers face when creating and designing websites with Linux in a professional environment.

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Designing Websites With Inkscape

design-web-inkscape

Inkscape is a great program to have in your toolbox as a web designer. It’s similar to Adobe Illustrator, but the user interface and tools are slightly different. It’s also an open source program released under the GPL, and is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. This program can be used on on its own without the use of photo editing software like Photoshop or Gimp to create professional websites. This tutorial will walk you through some basic techniques for creating websites with Inkscape using this very basic blog design as a guide.

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