Hi my name is Rod Boothby, you are on a blog called Innovation Creators and I am member of a group called the Enterprise Irregulars. Their motto is “Boo old school enterprise IT, hurray beer” or at least hooray enterprise 2.0 and the use of web 2.0 technologies.
The Enterprise Irregulars have their own website at enterpriseirregulars.com. It aggregates all their blog feeds. The group includes people like Jeff Knowlan, Andrew McAfee, Susan Skrabsky, David Tedbud, Ishmael Gleeney, Dennis Howard, Ross Mayfield, Vinee Merchandani, Sul Yurdus, Jason Wood, Jerry Bols, myself, about 20 other people but this is not about the group, it is about their amazing logo. Okay, I designed it myself and this green cast(ph) is about how you can build a similar logo using an open source piece of software called Inkscape. You can get at inkscape.org. Okay, without making a way any further.
(Demo)
Just jump right in and take a look at the inkscape application. Inkscape is a scalable vector graphics drawing engine that means you can zoom in on the graphics that you create in great detail without getting any of the fussiness or the blurring of edges that you would with a bitmap graphic or paint.
To create a logo like this, you start by going over to the left and selecting rectangle or square and drawing it out. You can edit the colors of the outline or the fill, to do that you slide the pointer, click on the rectangle that you have created, right click on it, select fill and stroke. This little dialogue comes up, you can adjust the fill, you can select any color you want with the fill. You can select stroke paint and select any color you want for the outline.
The next step in creating a logo like this is to create those little cogs, the way you o that is you select simply one of those polygons or stars on the right. You choose a certain spoke ratio and rounded corners and you get it shaped that looks a bit like this. Note that when you click on the shape, you can actually change how much it rotates either way, it just have to double click on it to get those kinds of bars. Scale it to any size.
Once you have got it, the next step is to change the shading internally so that it matches the kind of shading in dense, in the Enterprise Irregulars logo. Light on the top and dark on the bottom, I used this linear gradiant to select that and I have got couples stored already so, I select this one over to the stroke and scale it down a bit so it matches the other ones or something like, 0.25.
Okay, that is starting to look a little bit like this but maybe the gradient is not exactly right so I go over here and I adjust the gradient. Pull it down to the left hand corner, so it is exactly right that. Here we go.
Now, in order to create the little glass effects that you see on these ones, I then have to go in and create a copy of this. Create a copy, I cut out part of the copy and I start to do that by first creating a circle on top of it. I select the pointer, select this shade plus the shape below it. Up here, is a section called path. I can select path and select the intersection of this two shapes, I am left with just that piece and then bring that piece up here and change the way it behaves. First, I select the fill and I selected something that it is mostly transparent and then I go in and I select the stroke, the outline and again, I am going to go for something that is mostly transparent.
Okay, once I have got that, I want to do two things, the first is to make sure that it is behaving in the way that I am hoping it does by adjusting the distribution of that gradient across the shade. A then a little bit like that and then I am going to zoom in and line it up perfectly. Okay so, you repeat that a few more times over for each of the different shapes that are there. To write the text just simply selecting text and then trying in whatever you want so, good luck with any of the diagrams that you choose to create or logos. Please stop by the Enterprise Irregulars site, check out the latest and greatest in enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 technology for the enterprise, my name is Rob Boothby, thank you very much.
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