Does anyone earn a living using Inkscape?

Every graphic design position I have come across in the last two months requires one to be proficient with Adobe Illustrator as well as Photoshop and InDesign.

I have experience using Inkscape and have liked it ever since I found it.

Steve

I doubt if anyone earns their entire living using Inkscape alone. But I think a lot of people use Inkscape professionally. I'm not very familiar with graphic design, on a professional level, so I'm not sure exactly how things work. In some cases, I guess the company requires you to use Illustrator or whatever. In some cases, Illustrator can do things that Inkscape can't. But I think there are some situations where the company wouldn't care exactly how you do a certain job, as long as you submit it in the required format.

Not a "living" as such, but I am eking out a small amount of additional income creating web designs and logos designed in Inkscape. Very small projects and payments for now, but I'm hoping that my open source design software blog might lead to a bit more exposure and maybe a passive income stream, eventually. If I can earn money doing it, I can spend more time posting articles for others to learn from, too. I'd love that.

The graphic design world can be quite a hostile and snobbish place, at times. In my opinion, the crucial point is almost certainly the lack of CMYK support in Inkscape. Fix the colour space issue and it suddenly becomes a viable package for print AND digital work, and that would be transformational in terms of its popularity and acceptance. That's my view, anyway.

Though I'm not speaking from experience I think you can earn a living with inkscape if you freelance but not if you have in mind becoming employed by a graphics design firm.

This thread on Linkedin might be an interesting read for you: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Inkscape-in-agency-studio-who-157117.S.44828878

I'm actually working in a real estate Company for 10 hours a week. When I came there, I just said, I will use Inkscape and Gimp and they where happy. I think for smaller companies it is often a good solution, but as mentioned by other, most bigger companies with more than one graphic artist probably require AI and PS skills.

If

I use Inkscape, And blender..though i am New at design things..but i find these tools good enough and capapble of doing most of the things..I am not a guy who would worry about CMYK..or RGB..i still dont udnerstand most of the things in that Area...i get things done...for my purpose..i am working on websites and use Inkscape for WIreframing and making layout ...and Image processing if needed from Gimp (2.8 sucks) .
i cant say i am making living from it..but yes ..my work is as good as any one year experiance guy in the field and i dont have not much business in PRINT and stuff...

I'm very interested in this topic as I plan to create my own job of writing, correcting, reading text and doing small graphics and layouts. So I'm trying to answer this question : is it possible to be a professional and to use only free softwares (my activity will mainly deal with text) ? In other words : will my customers be able to open/use the files I will send back to them ? There's always the good old pdf, and I think Illustrator now understands svg, but It would be useful I think to hear from someone who tried (and succeeded ?) in this attempt.

I plan to meet several persons to talk about this subject in the next few weeks. I'll try to feed this topic with the results of my inquiery.

As far as text, I would think between Scribus and Inkscape, you'd have just about everything you need. Although, please note, I'm not intimately familiar with the professional graphics world.

you can do quality job in Inkscape, Gimp, scribbus but until a certain point, and with more work.
on the other hand this limitations & extra work can force you to find solutions and became an expert in the field, wille the automation, in hi-end package can hold your knowledge level low.

limitations, like the CMYK, prevent the open source to compit the big players.

I'm not sure CYMK is a real problem : RGB allows more colors, so it's always possible for the printer (the man) to do the conversation with his own tools with no need to guess missing colors (and you may always control the final proof). Anyway, I found a little useful tool here : http://www.blackfiveimaging.co.uk wich does the conversion, and can work in batch mode.

I met a professional writer this morning who said me (but it was not a surprise) that for text a text processor is enough. The this afternoon (it was a busy day) a computer graphics designer confirmed me that Scribus was just right for simple and not so simple layouts. Asked about svg he told me that he doesn't use vectors anymore, but HD bitmaps instead and that it does the trick.

I'll continue my inquiry and keep sharing the results.

Does anyone earn a living using Inkscape?

I wish a had creativity and enough skills for this. I'm pretty bad in these kind of things.

Inkscape has yet to accomplish what LibreOffice/OpenOffice is doing to Microsoft Office. I see many organizations are now using LibreOffice instead of paid Microsoft solutions.

The graphics segment is still dominated by commercial products (Adobe, Corel...).

Simple answer: Not me.

Not me either, but I want to. I sell to Microstock (MS), which is hard to make a living off of anyway. If Ink. would have vector gradients then I could probably do better, so now I usually end up selling jpgs and clipart until such time there aren't anymore Ink. rasterized gradients.
AI is simply cost prohibitive for me, not that I expect it to be open source, but I would have thought/hoped by now it would have come down significantly in price.

the printer (the man) to do the conversation with his own tools with no need to guess missing colors (and you may always control the final proof).
@
1)if he is professional he will refuse, cause only you the creator know the final result. ( that's why we use CMYK & PANTONE: we all know the final results).
2) he will charge you for that conversion. if you ever find a safe way to agree in the final color export

final proof is not something that printer or anyone else control. is the final proof, made by the creator, sign by the creator in the back of the paper, and must reproduce with 100% accuracy. its impossible to be done with logical cost from RGB, cause separations in cmyk must be done from scratch without knowledge of the correct final result.

-----

scribus like inkscape can do anything ( complex usually is translated as: bad and easy design), that big professional soft can do, but in significant more time.
You can calculate the time vice versa compare in the price of the pro.

I make a living out of graphics design and printing and as of that I have considered many times if I can do my job with open source programs.

So far the only opensource program I believe is ready for prime time, is not graphic related and I talk about libre office. I do all my writing there and I believe it is a complete program that give to me what I need in a good amount of time. And I do write a lot since I work as well as a hardware editor in a PC gaming website (though I don't make any money out of that atm).

The above is more or less a sidenote, however, in the graphics field only scribus I believe is ready for prime time but there are some problems with it as well, for example opening a file made with windows version, in linux version may have some objects moved and this is completely unacceptable.
Everything else, at least on the level of use that I do, is enough and fast.

Inkscape is cute, and easy to master but is missing some functionality here and there that can disrupt a workflow with strict deadlines and I simple can't use it for work atm. Cmyk support is a big negative as well. I love how well inkscape can work with vinyl cutting machines!

gimp is nice as well, but there are 2 major flows that it doesn't seem developers care about.
1st the interface is not friendly, I mean it feels that it does things completely different than most raster programs out there, yeah I know most programs try to match photoshop, that's the point here.
While I was in college I learned photoshop, it's an education standard now and the best way to help someone immigrate from photoshop to something else is having a UI in a similar philosophy.
Inkscape for example is having the same philosophy with corel draw and illustrator, it didn't took me much time to figure out where I can find the functions I was looking for.
Last time I talk to a developer about that the response was more or less like "we don't care about that, we want to be different from photoshop"... well being different for the sake of being different is not really helping here.
Pro people invested time and money to learn photoshop, and they are not willing to invest more time and money to relearn everything, mostly because they can't have that luxury.
The only reason I can use gimp a bit effectively atm is that I associated manually the keyboard shortcuts according to photoshop's ones.
But this is really time consuming.

Second is the cmyk support, again after talking in irc with a dev, he said there is no interest from the team for cmyk support and he defended that so strongly that I'm sure that in his eyes, anyone who is asking for cmyk support is some weird stone age monkey... well sorry for being like that, but when it comes to printing cmyk is still a great need, maybe sometime in the future where offset printing will be dead and printing in general will be dead we will not need cmyk anymore, but till that time we do need the cmyk support, or we simple can't work.


Now that I read my post, I mostly complain about gimp... duh... sorry about that, just need to speak out loud about all that things that prevent me from using opensource for my job

I have used Inkscape successfully to design objects for laser cutting for small scale manufacturing.

I also used to use Inkscape on Linux for all the graphics for a commercial website until I had some problems with absolute linking and ghosting with large real world size cavases I moved to Xara Photo and Graphic Designer for a couple of years but due to it's lack of image linking support and lack of 64 bit processing I am now preparing to switch back to Inkscape very soon since relative image linking works. Also I learned a couple of nice tricks with Inkscape that make aspects just as easy as with Xara.

It's all for a smaller family business but that's commercial.

i had use Xara and it was great. By far the lightest software i had ever use with a smooth UI . But it was very limited for what i need. Inkscape had the same tool and it was free, but not so smooth experience.