How to create a concept project with Inkscape
beginner friendly
Concept projects are the best! And the worst. Mostly because the lengths you should go are always pretty vague. How much work is enough to present your ideas for a space or a building? And how do you define the checkpoint where you should stop? No one really knows.
When this landed on my desk I got very anxious. A plot at Ikaria and the owner’s vision for a multipurpose space for the summer. A restaurant, a coffee shop, a small theater and a couple of other activities, mostly appealing to tourists and visitors. The input was a .dwg file with a few altitude measurements here and there, coordinates and photos depicting the surroundings. What am I supposed to do with this information? I wondered and kept avoiding the task for a few days. My brain did a lot of back-end work until I felt ready to actually do something. Let’s go.
1. Get to know the requirements
Fortunately our client was pretty clear about the uses he desired to accommodate. All I had to do here was to decide the best way to depict this. Since I only had a plan of the plot, I decided to go with that. I would create a plan view, almost from scratch. I also did some research on the uses and the building regulations to have a more complete overview.
2. Create a background
I went with maps that I could find online. Using the coordinates I managed to pinpoint the location. I took a screenshot of the spot. And that’s all for this step.
3. GIMP time
Because I didn’t like the colors and all those details, I imported the image in the GIMP and played around with the saturation. I also dragged the image curves to darken some areas and highlight others. Last modification was to go to Filters > Artistic > Oilify… This blended the colors a bit and blurred the image to the point that it resembled an oil painting. This is the result:
4. Contour lines
That was the hardest part. I couldn’t find a way to create the contour lines. I searched and searched and this site popped up. I zoomed in and found our plot, left-clicked twice on two different points. This led to a rectangle area that covered the plot between two pins. The only parameters I filled in were the number of levels, the level of interval and the units (m). Finally, I clicked get data. Contour lines appeared on the map. Victory! I scrolled down and there was this option Save Contour Map as an SVG file in bold. Hit Download SVG file and I was good to go. In order to make sure that this site was legit even at a basic level, I got the data for another area as well, that I already had a contour lines .dwg. Very roughly they matched. (Yay! \o/)
5. Inkscape
I opened the .svg file with Inkscape and I imported the screenshot as well (it’s important to use links in files that usually tend to get very large. This harms portability a bit but makes it much easier to work with files). The contours were on top. I thought I was done.
Wrong.
I didn’t like it. The background seemed irrelevant, it didn’t match well, it felt strange. I tried to fix it, tweak it, customize it. It did not look good. Period.
So I decided to re-draw all the lines using the Bezier tool. I moved the initial contour lines on a different layer, lowered the opacity and locked it to avoid mistakes. It helped me to trace some contour lines and adjust them according to what the satellite image depicted. It was time consuming and hard. When I was done, I crosschecked the result with the altitudes the .dwg provided. It far improved, don’t you think?
6. Concept design
Now that I had a decent background I moved to some user scenarios to sort out our visitor audience. Families, couples and friends. Harming as few trees as possible was high on our agenda. How do you make it friendly to all these people, while respecting the natural environment?
The best way to approach this was through a mental UX design. Simply put, I tried to imagine what I’d like to experience as a visitor there. What I meet first? Where am I directed to go? This helped me with the placing of our buildings in the landscape and the routes that connected them. Our main access point was on the northern side. I placed open air parking lots there and proposed an afforestation, because there was no previous tree cover there. Paths and walkways would follow the natural course of the terrain. Buildings and trees were placed parallel to the contour lines of landscape, following and enhancing it.
All these were created in Inkscape, using basic rectangles and squares. The bezier tool became my best friend for more complex shapes. Playing around with the colors and the opacity was the part I enjoyed the most.
7. The trees
Trees were a chapter of their own. To create one of those I layered four things:
- an outline
Bezier tool helped me to create it. I then edited the path with the Node editor to match my preferences and picked a dark green color.
- a green circular area
I duplicated the outline and node edited to roughly follow it. I used a flat green fill and lowered the opacity.
- a shadow
I duplicated the outline again. I moved it diagonally, towards the upper right corner of the page in a 45deg angle. I deleted some of the nodes and edited the remaining ones that osculated the outline to overlap perfectly. I used a linear gradient fill from gray to fully transparent, lowered the opacity and blurred it. I saved the file (thankfully nothing happened, I had to save earlier).
- images with tree top views
To add some extra detail to the trees I found two .jpgs I liked and imported them. Scale them to fit the outline and the general structure of the foliage. Oh, and lower the opacity.
Then I grouped all the elements and duplicated my tree four times. I placed the trees wherever I wanted (here in a diagonal row). To avoid a tile-like outcome, I edited each tree separately. Feel free to rotate, scale up or down, distort a bit, flip, change the opacity, lower or raise the selection. Nature is about diversity after all!
8. Final touches
- zoom in.
I needed a zoomed in depiction to the area, where the restaurant was in order to show how the tables were placed on the different levels. A simple circle with no fill did the trick. It worked as a magnifying tool on the left. I made it more vibrant to separate it in an even more discrete way.
- text
Below the zoom-in area I created a semi-transparent rectangle and wrote a few things about the project. Try to avoid too technical terminology. Prefer simple explanations that appeal to anyone. Keep it short and sweet, it is easier to understand.
- pictures
I decided that a plan drawing and a text box alone wouldn’t communicate the atmosphere I had in mind. Some good photos would capture better the vibe. I downloaded a few suitable pictures from Unsplash for free and placed them on the right side of the layout. My little mood board already elevated the aesthetics.
9. Done!
This is the final result. What do you think?
