When we started developing Taiga at Kaleidos, we decided, for the first time, to design the product internally instead of hiring an external designer. We wanted Taiga to be truly as theTaiga team is, and it required to fully understand the soul behind it. Since we only use open source software for our front and back end coding stuff, it made sense to use an open source tool as well for our design process. So we decided to go with Inkscape, it was very know, enough powerful and we had some previous experience with it.

There is always a reason

While using Inkscape for advanced design work I found out that is mostly used by non developers, so its extensions are made by developers, for developers. There are a lot of math-related thinguies here (which is great) but not the extensions that I was looking for as a designer (something like this). Ironically, people are developing open source plugins and patches for proprietary software. Why? No idea!

So I decided I should learn how to make extensions to get same same features as others have but still using open source software, push forward OSS alternatives and hopefully, help other designers to come to OSS, use it and even develop their own extensions.

So, basically, it was a rant. I know.

This post is a basic explanation about how I developed a couple extensions for Inkscape not being myself a python developer (actually, I had no idea about python).

Open your text editor, we are going to get our hands dirty!