I used to work with Photoshop for years (industry standard, I thought). Moving to Linux, GIMP was the next to go logical step. I was never good in manually drawing vectors or embracing the vector image manipulation tooling in general which I regret now that I didn’t move to Inkscape from day one. Yes, I used Inkscape back and forth but I used Gimp more in the past years.
Inkscape is 20 years old and improved a lot in terms of usability in the past 10 years! I still think the right-sidebar options are too much hidden to be honest. For some unknown reason to me the Inkscape UI was just confusing for me. But I get the hang of it now (I think :D). Except exporting to plain SVG is still a bit strange where the image size I entered is not becoming the SVG document size during a SVG export. Inkscape still has a lot of room for improvements in those kind of areas.
That being said, I embrace SVG images more and more! I use it for business logo designs and recently also for Mbin logo designs.
I’m not going back to Gimp for logos that is for sure. And you shouldn’t either, use Inkscape!
I tried to learn GIMP to make some art a while back and got frustrated with the UI… I gave Krita a try and it felt simpler and therefore easier to learn. I wonder if I should try Inkscape, but I really haven’t made anything in a couple years, so who knows.
Gimp really is more of an image manipulation program. Like it says on the tin. Although you can do creative things, it’s pretty heavy on sort of algorithmic approach to processing existing raster images.
Gimp is a great tool actually, but only works with pixels. Yes it’s a manipulation program, it’s in the name: GNU Image Manipulation Program. Vector images are a dead-end with Gimp.
SVGs are really the beez knees, and vector is DEFINITELY the way to go. Illustrator is a vector application and arguably most publishing applications are also a combination of markup and vector.
Inkscape has had a fair deal of usability issues (I’d rather want Affinity Designer for some jobs, but no Linux version), but the new maintainers have stepped up.
One of them has a YouTube channel that talks about recent changes and future development.
Thanks! I will also watch some of those videos of Martin. I really hope Inkscape will have more improvements in the upcoming months/years.
I use Inkscape for Icons, logos etc. It is a great tool. Loved your work here.