When working on projects for various folks, I am sometimes surprised by their intended level of involvement. Some clients, who control every aspect of their day-to-day business are more hands-off than I could imagine. In fewer cases the opposite is true, a more laid back type of manager with an absolute Jones for the nitty-gritty design. Recently, when working on a logo for a client, I needed a solution that could edit a Vector logo for different projects. She needs to color the logo for the season and wants control over the elements for the web, brochures, business cards, signage etc.

I am not willing to part with my version of Illustrator(and I doubt Adobe would be ok with that either), so I turned to an open-source solution, Inkscape. Several months, maybe longer, it was listed as a free alternative to expensive, complicated software. I wasn’t impressed, but it has come a long way, and works great. It reminds me of the first version of Corel Draw I used, 5.0. This was a pleasant surprise, not that I loved C.D., but with the great price tag, good tutorials and native .svg format it is worth learning. I can move documents from Illustrator to Inkscape in an almost native file type, but I am a bit confused by the export bitmat option, which creates transparent .pngs - this migrates from a completely unusable web format to a slightly more supported format. I want to get to my images, which necessitates another conversion somewhere along the line. Almost there guys, almost.