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Using Inkscape to contribute to Arcticons

If you want a great way to get started contributing to this icon pack, here is a simple guide to get started using Inkscape!

Setting up Inkscape for icon creation

  • Install Inkscape
  • In the navigation menu, go to File > Document Properties and set it to look like this: Note the Display Units set to px, the width and height set to 48px, the scale set to 1x, and the viewbox set to 48 by 48.
  • Import a base icon or a template to start with. To do so, just go to File > Import and select the file you want. You can also drag and drop any file from your file manager of choice.

Start drawing

Inkscape comes with countless tools that can help you achieve basically everything you want, this can be an overwhelming amount of things to learn. However, thanks to Arcticons simplicity, you only need to know a few tools to get started.

Using the bezier tool

If you have not changed the Inkscape's shortcuts, pressing the B key will let you create straight and curve lines (also called strokes), your mouse will change the icon to a little pencil. When using this tool, you can click from point to point, click and drack, or click, click and keep pressed. You can also press Control while dragging the mouse to stick to certain angles. To finish drawing, press Enter or join your last node to the first one. You can learn more about this tool on your own.

Creating shapes

Most of the time you will want to make shapes instead of drawing everything by hand, if that's the case, you can use the E R and * to make Elipses, rectangles and polygons. These have many options, like corner radius, changing the height or width, but beyond that they can be a bit limited if you want to modify other aspects, if that's the case you select it, and click Path > Object to Path. This will make it a normal stroke, and you will be able to work more freely on it.

Selecting and resizing objects

Sometimes you will have many different objects and strokes on top of each other, you can use Alt, Shift and Control to modify the behavior of the selection tool, which is accessed by first pressing the S key.

Modifying existing objects

If you want to change the position of a node, you can use the N key to be able to edit the path of any object. Remember that if you wanna edit a shape you have to convert it to an object. If you click once, you can also move the object, but by clicking twice you will be able to rotate the object. Again, using any of the modifier keys can change the behaviour of this tool. Feel free to experiment

Align and distribute paths and nodes

You can access this menu by pressing Control + Shift + A, and here you will see many different options to aling your objects in relation to the selected area, the full page and other reference points.

Stroke styling

To make your strokes white, just select it, and go to the bottom color bar, hold the Shift key and click the white square, you can click on the X to make the color transparent, in case you added a Fill color by mistake. You should also make sure the stroke width stays at 1px. Use Control + Shift + F to view the Fill and Stroke menu and go to Stroke style and set the width to 1px. Keep in mind that if you resize and object you might alter this value.

Exporting

To export your file, you just have to save by going to File > Save or just hitting Control + S.

Usually Inkscape will add a lot of metadata that will get cleaned up by the mantainers, but if you wanna get rid of it yourself, you can use a tool like SVGOMG, or you can also do File > Save as and select Optimized SVG, there are many options you can enable/disable, you can figure them out on your own.

Uploading

  • Go to the github page https://github.com/Arcticons-Team/Arcticons/ in a browser
  • On the top-right corner, click the Fork button. You'll get your very own clone of Arcticons! (You need a GitHub account for this)
  • Once in your fork, click "newicons" directory
  • Click "Add file" > Upload files > choose your files
  • Select your masterpiece(s) and Commit changes (you can add a commit message if you want)
  • There will be a dialog "... is 1 commit ahead of Arcticons-Team/Arcticons:main"
  • Click "Contribute" > "Open pull request"
  • Type the pull-request message (e.g. name of the icons)
  • Click "create pull request"

There you go! Just wait for your changes to be merged in the app, and be happy, you are a contributor!