14 April 2010

NASA mission styled badges with Inkscape

Yet another benefit of having your content ready in advance, but it has its own downside too: with the beta delayed again and again I had to sit on this piece a couple weeks more than expected.



NASA mission styled badges with Inkscape

This time I have to start by giving credit where credit is due, since all the "NASA mission badges" concept, including the STS-98 reference, is shamelessly stolen from Zoltan (I hope I didn't gave away any of its ongoing projects).

So if I celebrated the Fedora 13 Alpha release with an Inkscape rocket drawing tutorial, I have to do something for Beta too (Beta is supposed to be bigger than Alpha) and after stealing the idea, making a Fedora themed badge in the NASA mission style seemed an obvious choice. Sure, you are not forced to use the same theme but use the instructions creatively. For me, I am aiming for something like this:
badge


The badge

So a badge is usually round, let's start by drawing a circle (keep the Ctrl key pressed to preserve the aspect ratio):
badge


Make sure it has no stroke and apply any fill color you like (going with the Fedora theme I used Fedora's dark blue):
badge


Now we need a circled text, we will need a guide for that, so create another smaller circle (leave it in a contrasting color so is easy to work with each element):
badge


Select the two circles and using the Align and Distribute dialog center them vertically and horizontally relative to the biggest object (the first circle):

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14 comments:

  1. Wonderful! Thanks for sharing!

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  2. Hmm that will work on CD. A suggestion about inner circle (red and cyan), you can simply add white outline and remove both red and cyan fill without the need to delete both circle. Hope it helps

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  3. wow nice. great tutorial too.

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  4. @Luya: my preferences was to hide those circles completely and make some new ones for outlines because I wanted fine control of the outlines placement.

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  5. awesome..i have always been a fan of the two: NASA and fedora

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  6. This is one of the best tutorials I have ever seen! Should be part of the Inkscape docs. Nice work Nicu!

    --gs

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  7. Thank you very much for this lesson, it's very good. Maybe in future you will post another lessons on this theme. It was very useful for me to create a stamp/badge with your lesson.

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  8. this particular tutorial was made following a request from a Fedora ambassador from Hungary, so please detail your request. (still, no promise :) )

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  9. I refer to: how to use Inkscape in different situations, another examples,situations. I liked your lessons because you explained very well, with capture screen and many steps,so finally I understand how to use this program to draw a stamp. In another order, do you have some tutorial about how to use macromedia flash 8?

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  10. nope, i am not interested in promoting proprietary apps like Adobe Flash.

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  11. I'm interested to learn how to make animated exercises / simulations for some experiments/ for interactive lessons for my students and I'm using LMS platform eXe learning (which are open source) to do this but I want to improve the aspect;the platform allow me to integrated this type of files(swf). Because in many cases I don't find adapted content for them on net. Do you know if there are another program, open source, to make something like this? That's way I wrote to you.

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  12. Every time I flip the circle at the mankind portion of the tutorial my text disappears! Any ideas?

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