These past days I finally gave Inkscape a chance after years of putting it aside for more interesting stuff. I have a lot of hobbies, and drawing has never been my favorite one; I am pretty good at it, I just don’t practice it enough to consider myself a good artist.
This means that, outside of pixel art, I was never really that interested in graphical design outside of doing stuff for my videogames. But the past couple of days might be changing my views on it, and I am not sure of what to do now.
You see, I first learned about Inkscape when I got interested in the process of designing origami diagrams; Jo Nakashima, one of the biggest origami YouTube channels at the time, made a whole playlist of origami diagramming, I saw a few minutes of it, and was really interested in the process, but I didn’t understand English yet, and I also believed that Inkscape was for Mac or something dumb like that. The point is, that was the first time I heard about the program.
As time went by, I started blogging and I was reintroduced to the concept of .svg files and vector based graphics, I messed around with them when I did a blog redesign and I also added some nice icons that served as links to get in touch with me. However, all of the interaction I had with these files was using CSS, Neovim and some HTML. I actually did one icon using GIMP, I got the path, simplified it with SVGOMG and called it a day, didn’t touch Inkscape at all.
So, this week I downloaded the program and saw a couple tutorials online, and I decided to bring to life some icons that were not available in the Arcticons icon pack which is an open source project where you can submit your own designs, and since the whole thing is made out of lines, I figured it would be a nice way to get started with some actual work. I told myself I would do a couple icons just to dip my toes in the water.
I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.
The Aftermath
It has been 3 days, and I have already done 30+ icons for different applications, some of which I use, some that were requested. The last update had 33 new icons added from different contributors, the next update will have more icons provided by me, so that’s a thing.
It has been super fun, and pretty crazy, but somehow I managed to get myself into another hobby and keep working decently as a son and a University student, I even did a blog in the middle of everything. So yeah, my whole workflow might tumble as soon as a new crazy school assignment arrives, but so far, no problem, I actually felt pretty productive yesterday during class, since I didn’t open Inkscape during the whole thing!
Here are some of the icons I’ve done so far, you wont see all of them in the next release because a few were duplicates that had the wrong metadata, if you feel like Inkscape is too scary or complicated, you should give it a chance, it is not as complicated as you think, and contributing some icons to Frost or Arcticons is always welcome. I will probably redo all of my icons at the bottom section of my website soon enough.
This has been day 44 of #100DaystoOffload
