Andy Fitzsimon

Hi everyone, After a long stint in closed doors contract-land, I’m now on the chase for a fulltime job. I’m looking anywhere in the world* *except for UAE and central Africa And i’d really appreciate you promoting the site below.

We all know the world needs more open source designers, so lets start by getting them paid

Incase you missed it, the Libre Graphics Meeting happened last week.
Thanks to the always awesome Dr. Kaveh Bazargan, many of the talks were recorded and put online for the enjoyment of others.

I actually wasn’t able to attend for the first time, so at 3:00am GMT+8, I recorded a talk to be played at the conference and answered questions via phone and IRC.
It was a great experience. Here’s the full video.

Elements & Principles of Design – Free Software from Andy Fitzsimon on Vimeo.

How can I make the compiz “ADD Helper” plugin apply its effect for all windows of the active window process and not just active window by itself?

This plugin really does help me concentrate on the tasks at hand, but if i dare undock any inkscape dialogs, or need to see my colour palette in the gimp, it’s useless.

From example

It looks like HK will be my home for the next 1-2 years. Drop me a line if you live in the area!

a few people have asked me why I’ve left Singapore. To be honest, I had no reason.
Singapore is a beautiful city. In business it punches higher than its weight and for my lifestyle, I loved everything about it; The climate, my friend and the region.

My girlfriend Brenda has followed her career to HK and I’m here to support that. We both tried to make it work in Singers and after 6 months we’ve realised the best opportunities were further north. A hard pill to swallow when you’re so comfortable with such a lovely area.

But living in Hong Kong changes the perspective a little. The proximity to mainland china presents insight into what i saw growing 2 years ago, a furiously scalable resource pool, something I should be paying attention to. Plus, the tech and design communities here seem more grass-roots and enterprising (most design magazines I read growing up featured HK artists) it’ll be exiting to be a part of that culture.

This is an exciting move, thanks for letting me share the news. I’ll keep you posted.

for this tutorial you need a recent build of inkscape
here is the final svg file : http://pastebin.com/f1ff1cae6

open up inkscape and click on the pencil or pen tools. Select the new spiro mode

notice the shape setting? this applies a pattern along path to match a brush like effect rather than just a solid width path.

have a scribble with the rough shape you want to accomplish

let go and checkout your awesomely smooth shape .. its probably not exactly what you want yet.. but we’ll fix that later.

to see what inkscape has done for you, checkout the path effects dialog fond in the path > path effects menu.

if you have your path selected with the node tool, you can edit your pattern along path on-canvas. just click the show “next path effect parameter for editing” (we should rename that button). Anyway, have a play with the default.

If you want to try a brush like effect, just create a star with the star tool, convert to shape (ctrl+shift+c) and delete a few middle nodes (ctrl+delete) to get a similar shape to what you see here.

All done!
now you can fill and stoke your new path effect like it was a normal shape. have fun!

someday .. i dont know when. 2geom will probably support spiro splines. and someday (hopefully soon) this means native spiro drawing with a spiro tool rather than this path effect hack we’ve got going (notice the red original path ?) eww .

I’ve finished the preparation for my GUADEC talk. Thanks to everybody who contributed their Desktop screenshots.