Create Isometric Designs with Rounded Corners in Inkscape

In this tutorial I’ll be demonstrating how to create vector isometric designs using Inkscape. This is a technique that I’ve taught in the past, but thanks to some of the new features in Inkscape version 1.0, it now makes it easier to give your isometric drawings rounded corners, as you’ll see in the tutorial.

The following is just a brief written overview of the steps taken to set up our document and isometric grid in Inkscape so that we can draw as we please. For complete step-by-step instructions, please watch the video tutorial at the top of the page.

Create Isometric Design with Inkscape

The first thing we have to do is set up our document.

Set Up an Isometric Grid in Inkscape

To set up an isometric grid in Inkscape, open the Document Properties menu (control + shift + d) and create an Axonometric grid from the Grids tab.

As you’ll see in the video, I set the spacing of the grid lines to 50 px. Here’s how your canvas should look with the isometric grid added…

Draw Your Design

Now you’re free to use the Bezier Pen to draw shapes and objects that follow the direction of the page grid lines.

For this tutorial I’ll be drawing a phone with some chat bubbles above it. I always like to draw the smallest objects first, then work outwards to the larger objects.

We’ll be drawing the design with sharp corners first, then rounding them later on.

Once the object is drawn, we can use the new Corners (Fillet/Chamfer) path effect from Inkscape version 1.0 to round the corners of our objects as needed.

Then we’ll use the Extrude extension to give our drawing some depth and the appearance that it is 3D.

Once we have the skeleton/wire frame of the design completed, we can now color it in and add a subtle drop shadow.

Then we can repeat the same technique to manually draw some speech bubbles…

Again, be sure to refer to the video at the top of the page for the full tutorial.

Finished Design

Here is how our isometric design with Inkscape looks once it’s finished…

That should do it for today;s tutorial! If you have any questions just leave a comment below. As always, thanks for watching!

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