As I said in an earlier post, I am aggressively learning everything I can about Creative Graphic Design. It takes dedication and time, but at least I know exactly where I want to go. As a beginning artist, I must balance a few important and distinct elements of what I call “my graphic journey”.
Learning Graphic Design itself
I am not a graduate of any graphic design school, and neither have I had any specific classes in this particular field. As a consequence, I must learn everything myself. I must read everything I can find on the subject, in print or online. I have to learn about the basic elements of design: color, shape, type, function, balance, etc. I must compare design styles and try to incorporate the concepts I like into my own style.
(By the way I don’t consider Web Design an intrinsic part of this field: too much coding! Of course one can come up with the look and functionality, but not every CSS and HTML manipulator is a graphic designer per se).
Learning from Other Designers’ Experiences
This is where the forums, blogs and other forms of online communication become priceless. One can discuss ideas and projects, accepted rules and principles, views and opinions. One can talk to beginners as well as professionals. One has to put time aside for this type of learning, but it is indeed time well spent. One of my favorite forums is the Graphic Design Forum. There is a lot of knowledge in those pages.
Mastering the popular Graphic Programs
As someone wrote, this is an exciting time to be in the Graphic Design field. There is a score of powerful graphic packages out there. Being an outsider, I used to envy those who knew QuarkXpress, Illustrator and Photoshop. Today, I also have the “Adobe Creative Suite” users to drool over. Me, I still use products from the Corel Corporation, and they suit me just fine.
I also take advantage of the Free or Open Source equivalents. Right now I am using the Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, Quanta Plus and Scribus.
Whenever I can spare a few minutes, I try to learn one more particularity of the various Tools in my draw or paint program. Very often, I will hit a wall while trying to get a particular effect, only to discover much later, that the program already offers that exact feature I was trying to create, nicely packaged under some obscure menu item.
Learning how to create Special Effects
Not everyone needs to be another Kai Krause (of Kai’s Power Tools), but it’s nice to be able to summon some of these outlandish effects, from one’s chosen draw, paint or rendering program, at will. Since almost every online Text Effects Tutorial is in Photoshop-speak, I have to “translate” them into Corel-speak, since it is what I speak fluently.
On the other hand, I hated it when a new version of the combo CorelDraw/Photopaint, for example, started to incorporate ready-made effects. I wanted to “create” a glow around my letters, not “apply a glow effect” to them. But, I learned to live with them and love them, since they allow you to try different effects without wasting too much time.
But, to this day, I still document these “accidents” that happen in the course of using a program and save them for future use. In my Texture list for example, you will find tens of items like: my gold, my grass or things like that. They “happened” while I was using the texture generator for something else. So, next time I have to apply a gold effect, I already have a good one.
Finding Time
After all this, I hardly have time left for anything else. No wonder I am a minimalist. In fact, all my designing style revolves around Simplicity in Design. In a future post I will detail how i use the various tools at my disposition to reach this lofty goal.
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Blog post by Tatán
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