Inkscape popularity

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Idea

The idea of this is mostly about helping Inkscape and other open-source apps being more popular in the professional and academic graphic design world.

The needed is getting help from arts/design and engineering universities, associations (like http://www.icograda.org), design-related studios, offset printing companies, etc., the most worldwidely as possible.

Getting contact from both arts/design and engineering worlds would provide us to get the best features and intensive testing (specially on the speed and accuracy we need from this kind of application)

What also would help on Inkcape popularity is making it more visible from graphic design related magazines, like Eye (http://www.eyemagazine.com/), Communication Arts (http://www.commarts.com/), U&LC (http://www.uandlc.com/), Emigre (http://www.emigre.com/), DotDotDot, etc.

Comments and helps on this task is hugely welcome!

How to attract graphic design professionals: Prioritise the UI

• Clarity and usability. If Freehand and Illustrator do things a certain way in terms of layout or terminology then so should Inkscape - unless it is seriously sub-optimal.

I agree, except that Illustrator ways are indeed often suboptimal, especially in the context of Inkscape. Anyway, please make specific proposals. --bb

• The default keyboard shortcuts should be the same as the industry leaders. Reduce clutter and look at the UI trends Adobe are pushing. They have a lot of historical baggage to accomodate which Inkscape doesn't so we can get there quicker and cleaner. Another point.

See my comment in your RFE on this. --bb

As an Architecture student I use Inkscape specifically because its interface for control point editing is *better* than Illustrator's. I would never want to see Inkscape become a 'follow the crowd' project. We can look to programs like Illustrator, Xara, CorelDraw, and even CAD systems for inspiration; but never imitate a function wholesale unless that aspect really is perfect. (And I can't think of one of them which is.) I would rather see Inkscape become a leader rather than a follower.

To make Inkscape more palatable to my fellow students I would say improve its reliability, and the performance of complex files. Focusing on core functionality, and fixing the rough edges -- stuff that doesn't work 'out of the box' -- would also help with adoption. (alt-keys anyone? relative links for embedded files?) Remember that more that half of them are using OSX and the others, Windows. Out of 200-300 students I'm the only one using Linux. --Ciradrak 01:28, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

(I'll eventually edit this rant and move it to a more appropriate place.)

• Tutorial videos?
• Get Inkscape used for some major/important public art and publicise this?
• Prioritise the text editing tools so that they are more conducive to newbies who have been coaxed into straying from Microsoft Word's wonderful :( poster-making abilities. It needs to be easier to have different styles within one block of text; surely this is possible with css stylesheets in svg? I wish I had the coding ability to start implementing this. Legio noctis 20:13, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

others

[Google Trends to Inkscape and Xara]