How to Inkscape for Ponoko Newbies and Trace an Image

How to Inkscape for Ponoko Newbies and Trace an Image

So you've got an idea! You deserve a high five. Before you get cracking though you may find you stumble into a few hurdles, and the first that usually stumps people is actually getting your design into a form that can be made into something real. For people with design skills and experience using Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw it's not such an issue. But for real newbies it's a good idea to look for tools that help you get the most out of your design ideas without bogging you down in the details.

One tool that can really get you off to a great start is Inkscape - it has some neat features for you new designers that will help you get things going. The most obvious perks are:

A: It's FREE!

B: It runs on both Mac OSX and Windows, and neither version sacrifices quality for cross-platform functionality.

and C: It's FREE. Yes. It's pretty much the best part.

Why is it so great? Well really, the best software is designed in a way that you can USE it obvious, or so you'd think. Usability is important as to ensure that even beginners can get something out of it. If you have to have your nose in a manual constantly your creative juices will not get flowing.

Happily Inkscape allows you to play around and still get results. A good way to get a quick win with Inkscape is to try tracing an image using the video at the bottom of this post. Here are some simple points that can speed the process up even more, so you can start feeling like a real designer!

5. Remember KISS Keep it simple stupid! It can be tempting to want to trace something complicated but it can be depressing if it takes too long to get a first result. Following the video below will really help. Please note the video pauses after about 10 seconds you just need to press play again to get it started. Try just dragging the video slider to the point you're working on so you can focus on that point in the process.

In order to use your design on the Ponoko website you need to make sure that the lines are particular colours and widths so that the laser cutter knows to Cut, Raster or Engrave. It's easiest to do this AFTER you've put everything together, otherwise you'll just slow things down.

Doing everything first and then tweaking color and width also make the actual creation easier otherwise the lines are too small and you have to look at your work magnified to an absurd degree. You can avoid this by just drawing in a stroke width you like and changing them all at the end for the Laser.

When converting you lines to the right color and width for the Ponoko Laser you'll need to set the RGBA values in the "Fill and Stroke" window. Within the Starter Kit it currently mentions only the RGB values. This only gets confusing if you start setting the A to 0 when thinking it's the B. This causes your lines to disappear. You need to keep the A at 255 (as shown in the video above and image below).

With all this in mind, there's nothing to stop you creating awesome customized jewellery, stencils, holiday decorations or any other 2d object start simple and then get fancy... Keep an eye out for future articles to help you on your way.

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