Today I spent some time creating new arrow images for a web application I’m maintaining. For a while now I’ve been toying off and on with a freeware vector graphics program called Inkscape. This gave me a chance to do something real.

Not known for my artistic talent, I glued a triangle and a square together pulled on some corners and quickly came up with:

and which isn’t too bad for 10 minutes work.

But I wasn’t all that sure blue was the right color choice. So I created a new gradient and a couple more exports led to:

and Looking better.

In the process I learned how to export all four images with one button click.

The important thing is to select and export each object individually to a unique file name. Inkscape will remember this and use it for the bulk export. Yet another gradient / export iteration and

And then I really went overboard.

Now to decide what ones to use. Next thing I want to learn is how to apply a stroke to a segment of a path so I can outline the tabs