The first thing to do was to duplicate the target text. I was only interested in doing this on the large text. The next thing that I wanted to do was add lighting effects.

All looks good so I deleted the black box. For this, I created a black rectangle and sent it too the back by using the item shown in the object dropdown menu. I wanted to check that the text was legible when using a black background. The colours of the text can be changed easily by highlighting a selection and then selecting one of the colours from the swatch at the bottom of the Inkscape window. The ‘AP’ part of the logo used a non-standard font downloaded from a free font website.

The next step was to create a basic logo using the text tool. I decided to break this idea down into three layers as shown in the screenshot. I decided that I wanted some text with some lighting to make it look shiny and some special effects like a glow and a shadow. The first step is to open up the layers menu widget (Shift+… as shown) thing. However, the commands outlined here should be identical on all platforms. This tutorial was generated on a mac and so the screenshots have a mac look and feel. I have noticed that many of the tutorials on the web do not take good advantage of the layers tools and so I hope to address this here. I am an inkscape beginner but thought it might be useful to produce a brief tutorial that combines some of the basic techniques that I’ve leant from other tutorials. In comparison, Inkscape is easy to grasp and there is a large amount of user generated documentation online that will help you to produce amazing looking graphics in no time. In the past, I have tried to learn how to use various vector graphics drawing software packages, but have always run out of patience. For this, I used the fantastic open source Inkscape software.

This is a quick tutorial showing the steps required to generate a logo like the one seen at the top of this page. Using inkscape vector graphics to generate a website logo

Inkscape create logo