Hello, I've just moved over from Illustrator and wanted to share my first impressions... just in case it's useful for others.
My take is Inkscape is 10X better for Web & UI Design projects.
#1 - Fewer problems with licensing & AI pop ups. For an Adobe user this can be up to 15 minutes a day if you work off a bunch of computers at the same time with 1 license.
#2 - Interactively change colors of shapes & text. Surprising Illustrator is bad at this.
#3 - Better at modifying bezier curves. Illustrator pops up dialogue boxes when you miss click points. Inkscape is a more standard, more helpful Bezier curve editor.
#4 - Better at picking fonts. They right panel has way more real-estate to step through a big pile of fonts. I do wish you could preview the font you're trying out on the page though.
#5 - Better at working with code & text. Being able to type quotes instead of typographers quotes is great. In Illustrator it's many clicks to do this and you have to turn it off over and over again.
#6 - Better at .svg files. Literally 1 billion times better. For technical projects having all the svg codes and editors integrated is amazing.
Transition from Illustrator to Adobe: - The fact it loads .ai and .pdf files is amazing and helpful - The Illustrator keyboard shortcuts helped a ton
Improvements that would help Illustrator users:
#1 - I think locking is hardest area for me. If locking had a hot key and you could lock multiple objects at the same time I could get up to Illustrator workflow speeds in this area. I know there are work arounds but having the full workflow acceleration of fast locking could save a ton of time per day.
#2 - Could use a hotkey to turn on and off the "Tools Control Bar". Generally I try to turn off all the UI, focus my visual field on the design project and use hot keys. In Inkscape this can't work with centering text or changing kerning (as far as I know). You need to flip on and off the "Tools Control Bar" to make these changes. Everything else seems to be able to make changes in the right panel ("Layers & Object", "Fill & Stroke", "Text & Font", etc). But there's no dynamic way to change the text & paragraph settings where the UI pops up quickly and you get rid of it.
Anyways cheers to the team and community behind Inkscape has been a great experience moving over from Illustrator!
#1 - I think locking is hardest area for me. If locking had a hot key and you could lock multiple objects at the same time I could get up to Illustrator workflow speeds in this area. I know there are work arounds but having the full workflow acceleration of fast locking could save a ton of time per day.
Type "Lock" in search field. You'll find a Hide and lock section. Click on empty space between Lock selection and Lock all selected objects and type the shortcut you would like. Inkscape will warn you if the shortcut is already assigned to something else.
You can't select locked objects on canvas (that's why they are locked...) but you can select them using object's panel. There, you can unlock them, using a new shortcut you created or simply click on locker icon : this will unlock all selected objects.
Ok... that is soooooo awesome! Worked well - thank you so much that's really going to help. I'm teaching everyone in our office Inkscape as we're moving over so this is a big help.
You might want to consider putting <Ctrl 2> Lock and <Alt Ctrl> Unlock All in the Illustrator hot keys... everyone's Illustrator muscle memory would just work.
I just finished my first production project using Inkscape it went really well... I used the Export -> Selection tools to output the final artwork and it all worked out great.
Just to list a few more things I recently noticed that are great:
- Interactively Offsetting paths is a really cool feature and not nearly as dynamic in Illustrator.
- All the filters are really neat... looks like you can preview color corrections and shifts of artwork. I used to do this in Photoshop so it's cool it can be done right in Inkscape.
- Make Bitmap Copy is amazing for quickly moving between vector and raster workflows.
- Object to Path, Split / Break Apart Path are solid. This is an area Illustrator is strong at and I was worried you couldn't do professional level design work. Was a great relief to find out they worked really well.
- I kind of like how the gradients work. I found the widget for dragging the gradient to be more clean & intuitive than Illustrator. I also like how visual the gradient widget editing is and mixed with the "Fill & Stroke" settings... I use that circle with a triangle color HSL mode which was confusing at first but I really like it because you have such great control over visualizing picking colors...
Community Café The Flee Adobe Movement - First Thoughts
Inkscape.org
Hello, I've just moved over from Illustrator and wanted to share my first impressions... just in case it's useful for others.
My take is Inkscape is 10X better for Web & UI Design projects.
#1 - Fewer problems with licensing & AI pop ups. For an Adobe user this can be up to 15 minutes a day if you work off a bunch of computers at the same time with 1 license.
#2 - Interactively change colors of shapes & text. Surprising Illustrator is bad at this.
#3 - Better at modifying bezier curves. Illustrator pops up dialogue boxes when you miss click points. Inkscape is a more standard, more helpful Bezier curve editor.
#4 - Better at picking fonts. They right panel has way more real-estate to step through a big pile of fonts. I do wish you could preview the font you're trying out on the page though.
#5 - Better at working with code & text. Being able to type quotes instead of typographers quotes is great. In Illustrator it's many clicks to do this and you have to turn it off over and over again.
#6 - Better at .svg files. Literally 1 billion times better. For technical projects having all the svg codes and editors integrated is amazing.
Transition from Illustrator to Adobe:
- The fact it loads .ai and .pdf files is amazing and helpful
- The Illustrator keyboard shortcuts helped a ton
Improvements that would help Illustrator users:
#1 - I think locking is hardest area for me. If locking had a hot key and you could lock multiple objects at the same time I could get up to Illustrator workflow speeds in this area. I know there are work arounds but having the full workflow acceleration of fast locking could save a ton of time per day.
#2 - Could use a hotkey to turn on and off the "Tools Control Bar". Generally I try to turn off all the UI, focus my visual field on the design project and use hot keys. In Inkscape this can't work with centering text or changing kerning (as far as I know). You need to flip on and off the "Tools Control Bar" to make these changes. Everything else seems to be able to make changes in the right panel ("Layers & Object", "Fill & Stroke", "Text & Font", etc). But there's no dynamic way to change the text & paragraph settings where the UI pops up quickly and you get rid of it.
Anyways cheers to the team and community behind Inkscape has been a great experience moving over from Illustrator!
Thanks for sharing your first impressions
You can modify shortcuts in inkscape preferences.
You can't select locked objects on canvas (that's why they are locked...) but you can select them using object's panel. There, you can unlock them, using a new shortcut you created or simply click on locker icon : this will unlock all selected objects.
Hope this helps.
Ok... that is soooooo awesome! Worked well - thank you so much that's really going to help.
I'm teaching everyone in our office Inkscape as we're moving over so this is a big help.
You might want to consider putting <Ctrl 2> Lock and <Alt Ctrl> Unlock All in the Illustrator hot keys... everyone's Illustrator muscle memory would just work.
I just finished my first production project using Inkscape it went really well... I used the Export -> Selection tools to output the final artwork and it all worked out great.
Just to list a few more things I recently noticed that are great:
- Interactively Offsetting paths is a really cool feature and not nearly as dynamic in Illustrator.
- All the filters are really neat... looks like you can preview color corrections and shifts of artwork. I used to do this in Photoshop so it's cool it can be done right in Inkscape.
- Make Bitmap Copy is amazing for quickly moving between vector and raster workflows.
- Object to Path, Split / Break Apart Path are solid. This is an area Illustrator is strong at and I was worried you couldn't do professional level design work. Was a great relief to find out they worked really well.
- I kind of like how the gradients work. I found the widget for dragging the gradient to be more clean & intuitive than Illustrator. I also like how visual the gradient widget editing is and mixed with the "Fill & Stroke" settings... I use that circle with a triangle color HSL mode which was confusing at first but I really like it because you have such great control over visualizing picking colors...