High on my own success, I figured this layout stuff was going to be easy. As it turned out, I actually managed to teach myself enough skills in Inkscape through pure brute force and some use of license-free public assets as a reference to build myself what I wanted. Free is my favourite cost, and I’d rather support open source and libre software wherever possible. I can build a website and lay that out quite easily, and I’ve even written some crazy hacks for generating PDFs with HTML that do automatic text flowing with javascript and the like, but as I soon learned, that is nothing at all like doing layout for print with a DTP program.įor logo illustration, I went with Inkscape because I run Linux and the aforementioned poorness. While I’ve got the writing down, and the editing to a certain degree (with lots of proofreading and suggestions from writer friends I’ve managed to cajole into helping me, or who have kindly offered because they are awesome), I’ve literally never done vector art nor desktop publishing. Print layout? That’s basically the same as what I do already in HTML, right? Vector illustration for logos, that’s just drawing some lines, right? Editing, that’s just writing, but for stuff you’ve already written… Since I’m poor, stubborn and probably more than a little stupid, I decided I would rather spend all my entire budget on artwork and teach myself how to do literally everything else. I’m currently producing a sourcebook for a tabletop roleplaying game.