Design

Revolutionizing garment-making in Italy with Valentina

Here is a tailor shop in Sicily actively using Valentina for pattern design

Meet Akira, free/libre interface design tool

Getting crowdfunded: interview with Akira lead developer Alessandro Castellani

Swapped coordinates in Inkscape and other stories from frozen hell

Gradient meshes and hatching to be removed from SVG 2.0

While development of this W3C standard continues, some features are to be axed from SVG 2.0

Mastering Inkscape in 2018

What’s best among books, courses, and tutorials on the free/libre vector graphics editor

Valentina fork settles down as Seamly2D, Valentina goes on

Four months into a bizarre fork of Valentina, free pattern-making software for fashion designers, Susan Spencer's leg of the fork finally gets rebranded as Seamly2D.

Is SVG 2 really on life support?

SVG 2 might arrive sometime in the future without quite a few useful features that have been already developed and tested. What's up with that?

GIMP 2.9.2 released, how about features trivia?

The GIMP team made the first public release in the 2.9.x series. It's completely GEGL-based, has 16/32-bit per channel editing and new tools.

GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next?

This week, GIMP celebrates its 20th anniversary

Red Hat releases free/libre Overpass font family

Red Hat announced the release of Overpass, their own highway gothic font family designed by Delve Fonts.

Free garment design software Valentina 0.3 released

New version of Valentina, free/libre pattern making software for fashion designers features improved output for cutting and design tools enhancements.

Inkscape 0.91 released

Over 4 years in the making, thousands of commits, dozens of new features: it's all there, neatly packed in the newly released Inkscape 0.91.

Introducing ArgyllPRO ColorMeter for Android

Graeme Gill has just announced immediate availability of ArgyllPRO ColorMeter, a commercial Android app that allows using colorimeters and spectrophotometers directly via the USB on-the-go port.

Artificial intelligence designs websites, uses open technology stack

The AI-based web publishing tool designs and maintains websites, and it's based on a slew of free/libre software projects.

Change of heart. Inkscape starts encouraging paid development

After years of being dead against paid development, the Inkscape Board came up with a policy that encourages personal (crowd)funded projects.

Quasado opensources Gravit, web-based design tool

Berlin-based company Quasado released source code of Gravit, their HTML5-based design app, under dual GPLv3+/commercial license.

Introducing Valentina, free fashion design software

Over the years we've been to numerous discussions about viability of free software for graphic design. But what about fashion design?

Linux gets support for Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch tablets

The most recent of Wacom drivers for Linux features support for the most affordable series of the company's graphic tablets.

ZebraTrace, from Guilloché to hatching in a single equation

Maxim Barabash released a new version of ZebraTrace, a free application for tracing bitmaps into a hatching pattern based on a mathematic equation

GIMP gets canvas rotation

The new feature is mostly useful for digital painting and drawing, as well as for preparing textures in CG

What free software projects will be sponsored by Google this summer?

Last night, Google started publishing the list of mentoring organizations accepted to the Summer of Code 2013 program

Lettering and logo design by Filip Komorowski

Lettering and logo design are some of the areas where Inkscape truly shines thanks to well designed shape and path drawing tools. Today we are looking at the work by Filip Komorowski, an artist from Poland.

Too little, too late? sK1 project opens up

Earlier this week, Igor Novikov finally posted the first portion of news regarding development of UniConvertor, PrintDesign, and LinCutter since 2011.

Dave Crossland on Crafting Type and making a difference

Is there such a thing as a roadshow for free graphic design software? In a way, there is: a “Crafting Type” workshop combines an introduction to type design with basics of using FontForge and Inkscape.

Autopsy goes public, font families in uproar

Dave Crossland, the renowned master of eloquence, persuaded Yanone to release Autopsy as an open source project.

Stagestack faces dead-end, source code release considered

Stagestack, a work-in-progress vector graphics editor is facing the dead-end after failing to become a financially self-supporting project. Developers are thinking about releasing the source code now.

Advanced samplers for GEGL to be crowdfunded

Nicolas Robidoux aims to implement advanced samplers in GEGL — the new GIMP's image processing engine

Freeing FreeHand. The story of grief, revenge, and refusal

Angled guides and snapping for Inkscape beginners

Inkscape's v0.46 was the first version that got angled guides. Along with advanced snapping introduced in later versions it makes accomplishing certain tasks much easier. Let's see how.

Free tools for vinyl cutting on Linux

Ever wondered if you could get one of those fancy vinyl cutters and not abandon Linux?

Inkscape gets OpenSCAD converter

Tired of jumping through hoops to go from Inkscape to OpenSCAD? Dan Newman created a new 3rd party extension that simply exports vector objects as .scad files.

GIMP 2.8 released, next version to get high bit depth precision

After 3.5 years of blood, sweat and tears the GIMP team announced the release of GIMP 2.8. But good things come in pairs.

Embroidery design on Linux now possible with Thred

Nathan Summers contacted us to tell about an embroidery editor for Linux he's been working on since last year

Introducing SVG Cleaner

Minimize your SVG files with this handy tool

UniConvertor 1.1.5 review

sK1 team released a new version of UniConvertor, a free vector graphics converter. Here comes the review.

Exchanging colors between GIMP, Inkscape and Gpick

The review of Gpick mentioned that you can drop colors from Gpick to either Inkscape or GIMP. What it doesn't mention is that you can freely drag and drop colors between those three applications.

Advanced ways to create guides in GIMP

The review of Gpick mentioned that you can drop colors from Gpick to either Inkscape or GIMP. What it doesn't mention is that you can freely drag and drop colors between those three applications.

How to get crisper text out of Inkscape

Presumably most Inkscape users rely on the default PNG exporting method only. But there's more than one way to do it.

How to get CMYK colors from Inkscape to Scribus for printing

Interview with Inkscape developers

Richard Hughes on color management in Linux and GNOME

What's new with GNOME Color manager, what changes are coming to the Linux printing system

How to save all visible content in GIMP

In this GIMP tutorial, we introduce you to the concept of projections and explain how to save everything visible in GIMP's image window to a file

Inkscape explores type design, gets Measure tool

Inkscape got a whole new tool for measuring things

New versions of GNOME Color Manager and colord released

The new beta versions are bringing lots of awesomeness

How to save and restore selections in GIMP

Sometimes when you work on a complex project in GIMP, you carefully construct a very precise selection you might need later, so how do you save it?

Creating harmonic color schemes with Gpick

This is an introduction to creating harmonic color schemes with Gpick, an advanced free color picker

GIMP add-ons: types, installation, management

This is the ultimate guide to installing and managing GIMP add-ons like brushes, plug-ins, scripts.

How to create your own templates for Inkscape

Interview with Inkscape developers

Inkscape: embedding or linking images?

This article explains the difference between embedding and linking in Inkscape and advices when to use each of them.

How to draw an eye in anime style with Inkscape

Learn how to draw a classic anime-style eye using Inkscape.

How to create layer effects in Inkscape

With built-in XML editor, a bit of grey hair, and slight headache you will learn to create a kind of layers effects in Inkscape to apply same SVG filter to all a objects of a layer in your drawing.

How to draw a computer first-aid kit with Inkscape

Learn how to use the 3D Box tool in Inkscape to create a base for a complex object in perspective and draw complex shadows.

GNOME Color Manager 2.29.4 released

Richard Hughes released new version of GNOME Color Manager — a bundle of color management tools for GNOME.

Bluefish 2.0.0 is out with major new features

Olivier Sessink finally released a major update to Bluefish, his excellent advanced HTML/CSS editor for web developers.

GNOME Color Manager 2.29.3 released with configuration of default color spaces

A new version of GNOME Color Manager is out as usual on first Monday of a month.

How to draw a snowman with Inkscape

With this Inkscape tutorial you will learn to draw a 3D looking snowman, but ultimately you will get a grasp of creating shadows and reflections the right way.

SwatchBooker 0.5 released with support for Scribus and VivaDesigner color swatches

Olivier Berten has released new version of SwatchBooker containing many improvements.

GNOME Color Manager, preliminary review

Today we are doing an early review of GNOME Color Manager — a set of free tools to make color management in GNOME and Linux just work™.

ParaType releases its first open font

ParaType, which is a well-know Russian type foundry, has just released PT Sans — its first font family under an open license, which is, basically, OFL 1.0 translated into Russian.

First public version of GNOME Color Manager released

After a little over a month of work Richard Hughes released the first public version of GNOME Color Manager.

Gpick 0.1.9 released with two new harmonic schemes

A new version of standalone advanced color picker Gpick is out with several considerable improvements.

Gpick gets color schemes generation

New version of color picker Gpick is out with new features and fixes.

PingWin Software announces a new family of free/libre fonts

PingWin Software, a new Linux kid on the block in Russia, announces a new font family to substitude default Microsoft's font families.

What's new in GIMP 2.7.0 development release

GIMP team has just released the first unstable version in this development cycle with lots of exciting new features. Learn more about it.

Add an acrylic image effect to photos in Inkscape

This is a rather simple tutorial on drawing a stunning Mac-like clock in Inkscape using boolean path operations and gradient fills for nice smooth highlights.

Drawing Mac look-alike clock in Inkscape

This is a rather simple tutorial on drawing a stunning Mac-like clock in Inkscape using boolean path operations and gradient fills for nice smooth highlights.

Fontmatrix 0.6.0 review

Pierre Marchand has just released a new version of Fontmatrix. There's a whole bunch of new features and improvements that definitely deserve a review.

Dancing Tango on the Desktop

Let’s talk to two of most active contributors to the project — Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson.

Interview with Inkscape developers on 0.46 and beyond

Shortly after the release of Inkscape 0.46 we interviewed several Google Summer of Code 2007 students and several developers and asked about plans for future and new technologies.