18 July 2007

The useless guide to drawing shiny web buttons with Inkscape

[buttons]I understand the uselessness of writing yet another tutorial about creating shiny web buttons with Inkscape, but I think I found a niche: I don't know about such tutorials in my native language, Romanian.
So instead of translating an existing one, I was hit by the "not invented here" syndrome and wrote a [RO]Romanian Inkscape tutorial about creating web buttons.

With the article already written, it was obvious I have to pollute the 'net with it and make an [EN]English translation of it (usually I do the other way, write in English and maybe translate into Romanian later).

12 comments:

  1. Cool tutorial! Seems easy enough, perhaps I should try it some day.

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  2. Indeed, creating buttons is a basic task and doing it with Inkscape is a breeze ;)

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  3. Another great tutorial, Nicu! Thanks a bunch, and please, please keep 'em coming.

    I didn't quite understand the bit at the top about sending email to the gmail address at the top, so I didn't. Is this your email, to say thank you? Is this someone who discouraged you from writing these?

    If the latter, just ignore the haters, and accept our thanks.

    One thing that did bug me a little is the combined Union Jack/American Flag mashup to represent the English translation. I'm a fairly patriotic American, and personally, I'd rather just see the Union Jack to represent the English translation than some sort of awful hybrid. I suspect British persons might feel the same way. This isn't just directed at you, I've seen the same thing elsewhere. I'm not really offended by it, though.

    I'd suggest using the American flag to represent English, since there are probably more American English speakers visiting than British English, but alas, we've bombed too many countries recently to avoid the 'imperialist' label if we try to push our flag everywhere. I say, let's give the Brits this one.

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  4. Thanks for your appreciation!

    The disclaimer is about someone who unmotivated me but at the same time also motivated me, yes, complicated things :D And there is no strong requirement for sending mails there, it was mostly a pun for that person.

    About the flags thing, I know it is a pretty inflammatory political thing and the recommendation is to NOT use flags to represent languages, just wanted to make the page a little prettier and figured is better to offend everyone than just offend only a part of my readers :p

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  5. Nice one, especially for beginners like me. Now everything is missing for me is a simple howto about how to create planes with reflections of existing objects, like for example here:
    http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1195/575820351_d66639eecd_o.png
    ;)

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  6. liquidat, for such reflections see the very last part of my tutorial written for Red Hat Magazine.

    However, my advice is like this: for complex images is very hard to do the reflection in vector and keep the alpha transparency, so is better to create the main image in whatever way you want (vector, raster) and to the reflective part in Gimp, using layer masks.

    I will think a little and maybe I will write a tutorial about this in the next days...

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  7. I didn't knew that tutorial - very nice. Thanks :)

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  8. yet another awesome Nicu-Tut. Keep them coming mate! Also, from a purely selfish point of view, i think that the Australian flag should be used to represent the english language. I have no better justification for this than my nationality...

    :P

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  9. Yeah, the Australian flag! And then I guess I should change my writing style to a "crocodile hunter" mode :D

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  10. "crikey! have i got a bloody awesome tutorial for all you blokes and sheilas out there in inkscape world today"

    is how you should start your tuts...

    :P

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  11. Right on the spot mate!

    ROTFLMAO

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  12. anyhoo, i forgot to add that i did the following gradient for a shiny button.

    http://openclipart.org/media/files/ryanlerch/3797

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