Creating a launcher icon with Inkscape template 1

Scale your graphic

Scale your graphic to fit the dimensions of the background below, and place it in the centre of the Focal Zone (guides). Elongated elements may exceed the recommended “Focal Zone” by a few pixels. It may be necessary to temporarily group your graphic (Ctrl + g) to scale it proportionally (keep Ctrl + Shift pressed and move the handles of the graphic), but afterwards you should ungroup (Ctrl + Shift + G) the graphic again. Centre the graphic with the help of the “Align and Distribute” dialogue, as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 2.

Try to attach as many vector lines and nodes/dots as possible to the lines of the pixel grid to achieve a sharp graphic in your exported PNG in the end (i.e., with as little anti-alias effect in unnecessary places as possible). By using the tool “Edit path by nodes” you can drag the nodes to follow the pixel grid lines.

White glyph

Set the colour of your glyph graphic to white in the Fill and Stroke dialogue, as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 3.

Select a background

Choose a background from the Layers palette by clicking on the “eye” sign of the background colour you wish to use. (You can hide the document grid if you don't need it anymore by pressing the "#" key.)

Figure 4.

Create inner shadow

Activate the glyph on top of the background, and then copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl + c). Activate the layer CREATE INNER SHADOW HERE in the Layers palette, and paste the glyph shape in place (Ctrl + Alt + v) onto this layer. The new inner shadow of the glyph is now behind the glyph. You might want to lock the PLACE YOUR GRAPHIC HERE layer by clicking its lock symbol in the Layers palette to make sure that you don’t accidentally activate the glyph instead of the shadow in the following steps.

Figure 5.

Set inner shadow opacity

Set the colour of the shadow to black with reduced transparency, as shown in the screenshot below (circled area at the right-hand side). Move the shadow one pixel down by subtracting one pixel from the original “Y” co-ordinates (circled area at the top of the screenshot).

Figure 6.

Apply inner shadow blur

Activate the inner shadow and make sure that it is a simple “Path” object. To create the shadow blur, the inner shadow cannot be a group of objects or a combined object. To ungroup an object, select Object > Ungroup (Shift + Ctrl + G). To break a combined object apart, select Path > Break Apart (Shift + Ctrl + K). To convert a regular shape or text object into a path, select Path > Object to Path (Shift + Ctrl + C) or Stroke to Path (Alt + Ctrl + c). Activate only one object of the inner shadow, and select Inset/Outset Halo from the Extensions > Generate from Path menu. When you insert the data shown in the screenshot, and then click Apply, Inkscape creates several transparent shadow layers that create the illusion of a blurred shadow.

Figure 7.

Figure 8.

Keep the original shadow layer activated and set its opacity to 8, as shown in the screenshot below, to finalise the inner shadow. If you can’t activate the original inner shadow below the shadow blur, you can change the order of objects by activating the blur shadow, selecting the Object function from the top menu bar, and reordering the objects by selecting Lower to Bottom. This will move the shadow blur behind the original inner shadow, so that you can easily activate the inner shadow to change its opacity in the Fill and Stroke dialogue box.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.