Get Started in Graphic Design (May 2020 Live Stream)

my name is Dan Rodney and welcome to noble desktops how'd it get started in graphic design seminar and this link that's here is going to be slides that I'm gonna be going through for those of you who are attending live I'm going to paste this into the chat we are also recording this so if you're watching the recording like this we're probably gonna be putting this on YouTube so I'll put this link down in the description for the video as well so these slides we keep them up and if we never you ever need to update them in the future we we keep them updated and I have a bunch of useful information here for those of you who are not familiar with noble desktop we are located in New York City and we do in-person training there in New York City obviously not this during this time right now with everything going on with the the coronavirus but we also do live online trainings just kind of like this one as well so all of our classes are not only available in person but they also can be live streamed kind of like we're doing with this with the seminar the seminar is going to be a little bit of a different format though then our typical hands-on classes because with these free seminars that we do these are not meant to be a hands-on experience it is in their interactive in the sense that we're holding this live but our in-person classes that we're doing on a regular basis those paid classes are a hands-on classes where people are actually learning the software and using it during the the seminar these free seminars are a bit more informational kind of high-level overview of information all useful content but they're not going to be the hands-on type classes that we would typically have in in our paid classes so so in this slide deck that I have here this is it's a web page but you can use your arrow keys to navigate back and forth and if you're just watching this you don't have to follow along in the presentation itself you could just sit back and watch this but if you ever want to review any of the information later if you want to go to links that are contained because there's lots of useful information in here this presentation URL will stay up from now on so you can access all the information and the links that are that are contained in here so so what we're going to do for this seminar so we're going to discuss what exactly is graphic design what do graphic designers do and I'll be showing some examples of various different types of design work what apps do graphic designers use I'm talking about that for the different types of design what kind of computer might you need things to think about if you need a new computer if you need to upgrade it what might you need to consider and very importantly developing a portfolio of work designers need a portfolio if you don't have a portfolio you can't show people what you do and then this is how you get work is using a using a portfolio you need to have something good to show people so how'd it get started so the first thing is you need to figure out what kind of design you're most interested in as you're gonna see a graphic design is a very broad area of a profession there's lots of different things you can do within graphic design and so nobody does all of these different things so you have to decide what is it that most interests you then once you know the kind of design you're interested in what apps are you going to be using so all of these things are going to be done on a computer what apps do you need to know to be able to execute your designs and then there's not only the practical thing of how do you build something but the the bigger question of what should you do how how should you design something what makes good design typography color composition user interaction or user experience lots of different design concepts to think in mind that actually go into creating a good design if you have so basically there's there's the idea and there's the execution of it and both things are important because you might not you might know you might know how to execute something really well but if you don't have a good idea then it doesn't matter how well you execute it if it's a poor idea same thing too if you have a great idea and you don't know how to execute it then then you're being limited as well because you don't know how to build something so you need to have the of what to do and then also know how to actually implement that and and do it or you'd have to at least be able to hire somebody that would do that to to execute it for you sometimes that happens some people are once they get really good in design and they become directors they might be an art director and then they have people under them that will actually execute their designs and they're mainly focusing on the idea behind things practice practice practice I'm gonna drill this in you need to get good by practicing the more you do the design the better you're going to get there's it's important to study but it's also important to execute if you just put all your study in and you'd ever never build things it's all just theory until you put it into practice so practice is how you get good and you're gonna need to build a portfolio so all that practice work you do hopefully you're creating some good designs along the way and those things can be put into a portfolio so I'll show you examples of portfolios talk about what you can put into them and that's how you're going to show clients or prospective employers this is what I do take a look and judge if you think I'm a good enough designer to hire for the job or higher for the the project that you want me to work on so so what exactly is graphic design we do need to I think clarify it that really it's a very broad topic so any visual communication that uses artwork images and text really if you're communicating something visually that's a form of graphic design it's very broad so there's lots of things that are encompassed in graphic design there is logo design advertising social media magazines books websites apps anything that has a visual way of communicating something there could be icons there could be text there's color there's typography there's wayfinding for example signage signage is graphic design you know that stop sign the yield sign on the street there's somebody still had to design all that stuff it's all under the broad topic of graphic design so many different mediums that this incorporates print design Web Design presentations so much of different types of design across a variety of mediums there's a graphic design and video editing and animation and so I think because graphic design got its start decades ago and a lot of print design was initially associated with print design that sometimes people think graphic design means older school types of designs such as print design and I don't think that that's the case it's just that graphic design is very broad it's anything that is a visual communication I think is is graphic design now if somebody says I'm a graphic designer it doesn't really tell me too much about what they do so nowadays somebody might not say I'm just a graphic designer they might say I'm a web designer I'm an app designer I am a visual designer visual designer is basically graphic design but just called visual design you're like what's the difference people like new titles I think now normally visual design is more associated with digital design like web design and app design but it is centrally visual and graphic kind of the same thing people just like coming up with something new in part because I think some people think that when they say I'm a graphic designer oh you do you do print design know graphic design isn't limited to print graphic design is so very vague it's very general but but a lot of people are going to say more specifically what they do within graphic design because if I say I'm a graphic designer that doesn't really tell somebody what I do I could do so many different things so a lot of people want to be more specific as far as the kind of graphic design they do so we'll go through some examples and take a look for example logo design here's a beautiful logo design and the Nutri versity it's just it's not only beautiful but it's also very smart the forks for the columns of the university I just think that that's so so intelligent it's so simple yet so smart and Ignacio I don't know him but I've I've came across his website and I just think that so much of his is really intelligent debugging I think is is great the the de Bie right it's it's like the wings they're symmetrical with each other the e in the middle has been simplified and it looks like a bug ant debug I think that that's that's so slick and so smart and that's the case with a lot of his work for example this is such a simple logo here but pajama nation to flag with pajamas so simple still classy it's just a fun logo the wild ventures I think is also great like the typography here is wonderful the eye with the elephant inside it's it's just a beautiful beautiful thing to look at and also very iconic and beautiful design just typography there so just lots of different ones like furniture taxi it's so smart right it's a piece of furniture that looks like a taxi and I think when you look at these things sometimes you're like oh yeah that's that's a one that's a great solution of course that's the perfect solution and I think good design speaks to you when it's executed well it's you just say of course that's that's the answer right it's it seems obvious it's not to the designer that's creating it but it's kind of like of course that is the perfect answer when somebody comes up with exactly the right concept but if you just heard the the idea of furniture taxi and you hadn't seen this would you have envisioned this coming up to these solutions is not always as easy as it sounds you know it's obvious when you see it but is it obvious if you just heard it would you have ever thought of doing debugging using the D the E and the B so a lot of thought goes into it and sometimes I think people look at design and they're like you know when they see good design they're like oh of course that's that's so good it's so obvious but they they don't appreciate sometimes the amount of work that goes into coming up with that idea people totally notice bad design like that you get annoyed when something doesn't work or you're like oh that sucks but sometimes good design almost kind of unnoticed because it seems so obvious it's not but it's it's almost like oh of course but it takes a lot of work to come up with these ideas so really wonderful work by Ignacio here and so I'm just using my arrow keys to to go through here you can also use the arrows as you're navigating this but I'm just using my arrow keys on my keyboard book design also a an example of design I had previously worked in a design studio that did a lot of books and when I said I did book design people said oh you designed the covers and I said well yes but also all of the pages that come in between books are not just what you see on the outside there are lots and lots of pages they come in between I've worked on things like Jansen's history of art which is a thousand-page art history book that was a year-long project so a lot of work went into designing all of the spreads you think about a thousand pages we had to with the layout and design a thousand pages plus the covers yes and what I like about this presentation here is that it's not just flat spreads that you see here Frank actually photographed to the book and showed you the physicality of the book what it's like to look at it and if you look at his website which is seeming to always evolve and change and he's got a lot of different types of media up here on his website here's one project that's a book I just love the the physicality of the book that you can see the actual pages it's not just something like this like this is an app so he took a screenshot of the app but it's not just taking like a screenshot of the InDesign layout and you know taking some nice clean thing it actually actually looks like a book sitting there that required some photography skills to present it and it's a nice piece of work there so book design social media graphics you know you you sometimes take for granted the images that companies are posting on their social media somebody had to design those choose the colors choose the photography the typography put it all together and so in this case this website there - no they post social media awareness graphics and people can download them so they create them and then people can download those or share them on their social media to kind of spread certain messages and so every once in a while they're posting different images up here for different topics that they want to spread the word about and so somebody goes through and designs these graphics and post them here and then other people can share them so it might not be something that you're distributing to in consumers it might be something that you're just giving to a company for them to post but somebody needs to design those whether it's for Facebook or Twitter or Instagram whatever this current social media is somebody needs to design those graphics PowerPoint so presentation skills that is something that a lot of people don't think about and tons of businesses they they run their business off of PowerPoint when you think about getting new jobs sometimes there is a pitch and those pitches are presented with powerpoints so some businesses are very reliant on PowerPoint presentations to gain business and to communicate ideas and it's an it's a thing that a lot of people kind of just say yeah it's PowerPoint and you know as you just you just launch it use a theme and there's there's a lot that can be done with PowerPoint it's it's one of those apps that I think gets a bad rap from especially from designers because it's not an Adobe program and a lot of designers use Adobe programs and we'll get into that more later but they use things like Photoshop and illustrator and InDesign a lot of designers will snub their nose and just turn up their nose and say it's a PowerPoint it's Microsoft I don't want to use an office program but PowerPoint itself is a very powerful program it can do a lot and if you think that its design as cheesy that's just because maybe you're tired of the building templates but you don't have to use a built-in template you can completely customize your own presentation you can choose whatever graphics typography layouts and in a case like this every single one of these slides is completely custom designed there is a look and a feel to the whole presentation that gives it a cohesive this but this doesn't look like just any old presentation that you've seen before because it was custom designed so if you see a bad PowerPoint presentation it's not powerpoints fault it's the designer that created that or that there wasn't a designer that created that maybe it was just somebody that just chose one of the default templates and used a template that you've seen a billion times before so in the hands of a good designer PowerPoint can be a very powerful tool and you can do a lot of good design with it so it's a very capable program and I know some people that make a living purely on PowerPoint presentations that's the type of design they do especially because a lot of designers don't know and don't like to use PowerPoint if you're one of the designers that does know PowerPoint that can be a niche way to kind of set yourself apart from other designers that don't want to use PowerPoint some designers just like No I draw the line at PowerPoint I don't want to use it so so PowerPoint design so apps the graphic design issues I just mentioned that a lot of Adobe apps are what designers are going to use so Adobe Photoshop is for retouching and color correcting and creating all different types of graphics I know it is called Photoshop and a lot of people are thinking about it for doing photo editing but it does all sorts of graphics you you are not just limited to photo retouching you can design web pages in it you can design social media graphics you can even do like video editing believe it or not you can create animated gifs it's actually very good at creating simple little quick animated gifs so it does a lot in graphics in general so it's not just photo retouching although it's great at that it's also a general graphics program that's very very useful the primary thing being that it's pixel based graphics which are these little square blocks that make up your imagery as opposed to a vector-based program like Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator when you think about vector graphics vector graphics are not made of little square pixels they're made of perfectly described mathematical lines you don't to know math to use illustrator but behind the scenes they're using mathematics to create perfect crisp clean lines so logos for example are going to be created in Adobe Illustrator because when you draw your logo you don't know how big or small that's going to be and you always want it to be perfect so you want to be able to blow that thing up perfectly good quality and put it on a billboard or the side of a bus or a plane however big you want to make it you want to put on the top of a building you might say oh but my company this little company Amazon it's never going to be big you know we're just a small little bookseller website yeah that's that's what Amazon was in the beginning just a little book online bookseller and now you know they're one of the hugest companies in the world so you never know what your company is going to be you always want to have a good clean logo for it and that's going to be done in something like illustrator so illustrator does things like logos and package design a lot of interior designers and and fabric designers use it so fashion does a lot of patterns in illustrator packaging uses illustrator it's good for drawing iconography so if you're going to put an icon in your website or your app illustrator can also be useful so a good general graphics app for drawing and creating things that are more graphical rather than photographic so graphical I mean like an icon a logo things that are kind of crisper cleaner type graphics ones that can scale infinitely and then Adobe InDesign which is for doing page layout so it can create something as simple as a business card or stationery or an envelope but it can scale all the way up to huge books so InDesign is where everything kind of comes together typography and graphics and photos and everything it's kind of the meeting place where it all comes together and is primarily focused on print it can do some digital like you can export PDFs to use digitally but it's not like a web design tool I know that they technically have a web document but it's really is not meant for that at all it's primarily a print design or like PDF type design program and so if you're creating books and magazines and advertisements and brochures if you're going to output it as a PDF or if you're going to print it InDesign is a great program it's kind of king of type hagh Rafi so if you're doing a lot of typography InDesign is the place to do it it handles type beautifully with lots of controls and if you're doing multiple pages again InDesign is the place to be for doing multi-page documents I did looking did list PowerPoint here I know some designers might not list PowerPoint but it is a niche it's an area that a lot of designers don't know and so it could be a way for you to set yourself apart from the average designer if you know PowerPoint and you have good design skills you would be amazed at how many companies need good designers for PowerPoint because a lot of designers don't know PowerPoint they don't want to know PowerPoint and so if you know PowerPoint and you're a good designer you're gonna be part of a small group of people and that could be something that you can have as a positive on your side so we do have ways you can learn graphic design of course we have a certificate program which you can do either live in-person in New York City or live online if you do it live online by the way during this coronavirus time you can actually come back in and sit in on the class in person we were giving people we've extended normally it's a six month period but we've extended up to a year during this time because of the coronavirus and so you can take it online and then within the next year you can come back in either in person or online and do it again these are all live interactive hands-on programs that we're doing here unlike the seminar which is a lecture style seminar this is a hands-on certificate program and in here you learn InDesign Photoshop Illustrator and then in the graphic design bootcamp that's the conceptual part of what makes good design so what should you do for color and composition and typography and you'll do different projects like a logo project and social media graphics and you'll actually start to create projects that you can use in your portfolio so first you have to learn how to execute things on the computer and then you can start to think about what you want to do and then actually execute those ideas with your newfound skills in these various programs now there are other different types of graphic design so that's kind of our high-level program of graphic design it's a good well-rounded program with the fundamental three apps that people use but we do also focus on certain areas of graphic design for example user interface or web design so UI or user interface is it's how things are going to work on a digital product such as an app or a website so UI user interface so when somebody says I'm a web designer that does specifically say I do websites if they say I'm a UI designer I don't know Sarah if their UI designer if they do apps and websites or if they do one or the other maybe they do both maybe they just do apps maybe they just maybe they just do websites it depends so UI could be an app or it could be a website or it could be anything that has an interface that people use on a digital product and you're gonna design layout typography color composition just like you would as a general kind of graphic designer but specifically here we're talking about the type of thing so if I'm a UI or a web designer that means that I don't do print design if I just say I'm specifically a web designer I would not expect a web designer to have print design skills so I would not expect that a web designer knows it'll be InDesign for example sometimes people say UI design sometimes I say visual design it's the same thing in my opinion it's the same thing okay so if they say I'm a visual designer if I'm a UI designer it's the same thing just different terms for the same thing when you're designing something digitally it's one of the cool parts is it's not like print where you have to print something on a page and it's static it just it doesn't move it doesn't animate so with interactive design right the user interface design web design visual design whatever you want to call it you have people interacting with a product there can be animation there can be video so if the user clicks on something something can happen so there can be like a timeline of the sequence of events of the user clicks on this and then this thing shows and then the user clicks on this and then something else shows so that whole animation and interactivity is a very different mindset than a static medium like prints there are going to be core things that are shared in terms of like if you know what a good composition if you know good typography if you know good color you can transition those kind of skills between something like print and web design but there are new dynamics to think about when it comes to to web design so I know you've all been browsing the web and and you've seen websites before but let's take a look at these with the mindset of looking at it from the designer's point of view so it's all about thinking about I feel like most people they look at the web every day but they don't necessarily think about it when they're using it it's like you're driving on roads you don't really think about who designed those roads and how they how they made them so here first of all the color scheme is is a nice color scheme it's a nice primarily monochromatic color scheme everything's pretty much blue there's a little bit of animation that's nice when I move my cursor around to the screen that background animates a little bit which is nice but there's also some user interaction elements here they tried to keep the layout simple web development mobile development product design over here and when I mouse over something reveals itself so in interactive design you don't have to show everything from from the get-go right like here there is a menu that I can mouse over to see more options I don't have to see them all under development oh there's a lot of development things that I can choose from I don't have to see them all as I scroll down there can be tabbed areas so I can click on something to see additional stuff so somebody had to think about do we want to call out all of these things and make sure that everybody can see these without having to interact or do we want to group them together and make people click on these things it's possible that somebody might not click on this and they might not see that but at the same time this is easier to scroll past to the next thing so you do have to think about what you what information you want people to see right away for example testimonials do you just focus on one or do you show a bunch of ones they can still go through additional testimonials but if you saw a ton of testimonials maybe you wouldn't read them quite as much maybe it helps to focus people's attention on one testimonial at a time so lots of things to kind of think excuse me lots of things to kind of think about there could be fun elements that are it's not a practical thing it's just a fun thing when I click to enter my email all those little pieces kind of zoom it let's see that again just kind of zoom it so it's just for fun just for a nice friendly user experience so it's kind of fun let's take a look at some other sites here stripe stripe has a beautiful website here and if you don't know anything about the stripe website or the stripe brand the straight brand has a little bit of a diagonal in their logo so at the top of the tee the eye and the bottom of the P there's a diagonal to it so their identity is based on a little bit of a diagonal to it and their website incorporates that diagonal not to the point where it's too much but they do use those diagonals to create some individual interests not everything though is going to have a diagonal so down here you get back to more of a straight kind of grid and so sometimes they have diagonals but they didn't want to overdo the diagonals for everything and make you sick of it so they slip them in a little bit to kind of keep a cohesion for the whole design but they didn't overwhelm you with it sometimes if you do too much of a good thing you get sick of it like if you if you love something that to eat and you eat it every single meal every single day for the rest of your life at some point you're going to get sick of eating that particular thing even though you loved it in the beginning same thing with a visual motif like a diagonal if you do it too much it'll be it'll get boring but just enough gives you some visual interests but you can still create some things that are kind of straight and normal and then throw in a little bit of diagonal stuff to make it interesting what I like about the web's as well is that they have this nice kind of color system throughout and all the colors feel like they belong to each other but it's not necessarily the same color as we go over here to radar for example some colors are repeated but then there's new colors introduced so they all feel like they're the same family of colors that they all belong together but they're not they're not the same color so they designed a family of colors that go across the whole website and thought of it cohesively so as you go across each section can kind of feel different but yet still part of the same whole for the website and let's take a look here at the next one here so they have high-end audio equipments here for on the site and nice clean design here good product photography even thinking about the photography you know if you think about the color scheme look at the color scheme of these photos they all kind of go together let's click on one of these guys now they have wood in there they have tans they have browns so the the videos the photography that they have they try to go with the same feeling throughout the whole site even the colors of the products themselves the colors that they're available in kind of all go together with the brands feeling for not just for the website but but the brand has a feeling that they put things into a circle instead of a ordinary square it makes that look a little bit unique and a little different yes it's just a slideshow but down here the little indicator dots look kind of like sound bars instead of little circles indicating which of these you're on little subtle things like that they kind of extend the idea of audio instead of just just an ordinary slideshow looking thing this website I think is it's a really cool site I could never afford one of their hats because they're really expensive hats talking very expensive hats here just $1,000 for a hat so I don't know how I came across this I don't remember when I did but their hats are are the sight is just beautiful so very simple idea of just showing the hats and what I love is when you mouse over it gives us a little tip kind of like you know if you're doing a tip of the hat to somebody you know if you're wear wear a hat you tip it to somebody so doing like the little tip of the hat thing so it conceptually it makes sense it doesn't just raise up it tips itself a little bit as well as seeing the name and then if you click on it watch what happens when it comes in it doesn't just slide in it slides in and then it settles down so it's almost as though somebody tossed their hat into the ring and then each one does the same thing so it kind of gives a life to the Hat it moves in and then it it rotates down in so the shadow that's down here at the bottom has a little three dimensionality yeah the somebody was pointing on the chat the shadows yeah so the shadows make it almost feel more real as well because the shadows down here at all the time and the Hat kind of starts up a little bit higher and then sits down so it gives a three dimensionality to it which is really really nice so just and it's interesting because when you look at it and it's basic level it's just a slideshow right I think if you go back to hats and you click on one every single pages is the same thing it's just a slideshow and so the client could have said hey here's my photos of my of the hats put them on the website make them look good but just putting this little bit of a twist when they come in with the shadow at the bottom it gave a livelihood and a life to these that make it it elevates the brand right if you're trying to sell thousand dollar hats and twelve hundred dollar hats you want to feel elegant you want to feel higher quality higher end than just your average sight and if this was just an ordinary slideshow that just slid left to right with no animation it would technically work but this is a little bit special and I remember years ago watching a guy speak on logo design I forget who it was it was many years ago but he was speaking about finding one trick one thing one special idea in a logo design and that that's all you need is just one unique thing and that will make the logo interesting for example FedEx so if you look at the FedEx logo I don't know if you've ever noticed but the FedEx logo has a little arrow that's nested inside that's kind of it's one little trick and a lot of people don't even notice that the arrow is there but it's it's one little trick that it does now if they had put a bunch of arrows all over the place and kind of spammed it with arrows it would look kind of cheesy but in here it's it's a subtle thing and you know actually here you go somebody actually outlined it for you so it's just one little visual trick that they put in there so you don't need a lot of things and so in this case they didn't need a lot of things they just needed one little thing just to give it a little bit of life that tip of the hat it conceptually makes sense and it's a visual thing that you've never quite seen before that just makes it look a little bit interesting so sometimes you don't need to think of a lot of different tricks you just need to think of one simple thing that sets you apart from everybody else now Harvard Law Review you might have in your mind a vision of an ugly boring website because just text-heavy it's about law who's excited about law your average person is not excited about law I know some people are because you know there are people that are lawyers and paralegals so the law can be interesting in and of itself to some people but how do you make that visually interesting law is primarily text you're going to be reading stuff so make it beautiful make to choose a beautiful typeface choose good hierarchy of the different types of information that are here and make them visually distinct choose a really nice italic so that it's a beautiful font that you're using let's click on one of these things choose interesting backgrounds that add a little bit of color and add something visually interesting to the background so you get a little color makes it a little bit more exciting and but it's still abstract so you doesn't have to say a specific thing the text is what people are here for and make the reading experience nice right and even something like here you can without having to go to the bottom make the user experience nice because if you want to read something about a footnote or something instead of putting at the bottom and you got to scroll down and then scroll back it's right here if you want to read more you can but they don't want to overwhelm you with all that stuff so just throw them over here on the sides so they're quick and easy to access and if you want to read more you can read more but just leave them collapsed if you don't so just a few websites to kind of think about critically and if you're getting into web design as you browse the web actually start to think about the sites that you're using think about what works what doesn't work what do you think is successful what was easy for you to use what was hard for you to use what do you what do you think with an analytical eye what do you think about that website and why was that choice made and aesthetically you might not like everything right we cannot please everybody but does it work on a conceptual level does this work or does it not is really the fundamental question for people so app design now app design there's not so much of a specific rule of what works in an app design there are there's lots of things you can do you can do certain things that are kind of more iOS like or more Android like but I think a lot of apps will choose to do something that is very unique to that app so that the app feels different than your average iOS app or average Android app so there's not so many norms in app design you can kind of do whatever you want also even though Web Design has greatly expanded its capabilities and can really you could do a lot in web design that you couldn't do years ago app design pretty much if you can imagine doing it you can do it in an app design because you have the full power of very powerful devices at your fingertips and as long as you have a coder or programmer that can create that visually you can kind of do whatever you want and functionally speaking you can kind of do whatever you want as long as it works so you have a lot more creativity I think that you can do in app design to some extent yes like I said before there are some norms of things you shouldn't shouldn't do in apps but I think you'll see a lot more variety in app design than you do to some extent in in web design to some extent so app design you could be very creative I think the key thing and app design is it's not just about making something that's pretty it's also important to make something it's functional and I think user experience design is a very important thing it's important in web design as well but if you're gonna create something completely new from scratch and it doesn't follow any sort of kind of the normal visual cues that people were used to you have to do things like user testing and make sure that people are going to understand what it is you're trying to do when it comes to apps so user experience design is one of those things it's it's how something functions how it flows and what it's like to use that product that app or that website and with digital things user experience design is important so when you're doing visual design whether you call it UI or web design the apps that a lot of people are using as sketch is one that's a popular one it is a Mac only app though so sketch is used for doing things that are app design for web design or any sort of digital design that could have some sort of visual component or user experience components it's a macro only program so it doesn't run on Windows unfortunately so you do you do need a Mac to run sketch it's a very popular app a lot of people had previously been using web design sorry Photoshop for doing things like web design and app design so Photoshop has been very popular and it does still continue to be popular but more and more people are switching from Photoshop to sketch or Adobe XD now Adobe XD is Adobe's competitor to sketch so so sketch came out first before Adobe XD and so a lot of people are starting to switch from Photoshop over to sketch adobe notice that of course and said we need this next generation digital design app that's going to be good for all different types of digital design Web Design app design and a lot more they're even going beyond that to doing voice design so if you want to design Amazon Alexa apps which are voice controlled you can do voice control interactions so it's a very broad concept for doing new types of digital design and is starting to gain some traction right now there's not one app in the industry that is completely dominating what people are using some people are using Photoshop some people are using sketch some people are using Adobe XD but I would say sketch definitely has an early lead on things and so sketch you'll notice is going to be asked for in a lot of job applications Adobe XD runs on Mac and PC so if you're a PC user Adobe XD is going to be the way that you're probably going to go also for people that have Creative Cloud the Adobe Creative Cloud they're going to get Adobe XD as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud so they're gonna choose to go that way potentially at this point for me for example I know all three of them I can work equally well in all of them and if I get to choose it's going to be sketch or Adobe XD depending on the job and I can build things in Photoshop but at this point sketch in Adobe XD for doing digital type design like Apps and website design sketch in Adobe XD are definitely much more powerful somebody in the chat also mentioned figma figma is another one I hear lots of good things about figma I don't hear a lot of companies using it yet but I'm starting to hear some companies starting to use it figma is another one it's purely web-based so it's it's in a browser so anybody that has a web browser can use it that's also one of the downsides to it is it if you don't have an internet connection you don't have a design app so so that is a bit of a downside too to figma but a lot of people that I've heard of talking about its swear by it and say it's great in terms of what I'm seeing a lot of businesses using though I'm seeing a lot of design businesses using sketch and some now are starting to use Adobe XD I'm kind of keep an eye on figma and just kind of see what's going on with it and see if businesses are starting to adapt it adopt it into their workflow not sure exactly how this is all going to go but you kind of have some big players here sketch Adobe XD figma they're all kind of vying for the future of design somebody high up in Adobe I forget who it was says that he thinks that Adobe XD will be bigger than Photoshop which is really saying a lot there's a question of the chat about how these design apps differ from Adobe Dreamweaver Dreamweaver is a a coding program so Dreamweaver is kind of it's got a coding side for coding HTML CSS and JavaScript it's also it does have a visual side but it's not a design side it's a visual coder as well as a regular coder it's visual coder is not that great I wouldn't recommend it and it's also its coding side isn't that great either I would use another type of code editor code editor like sublime text Adam or Visual Studio code so for people that are coding websites if you're actually going to build the websites you're gonna write HTML CSS JavaScript code and so you'll need a code editor to do that it's not the design side of things it's the building part of it so if you want to build a website you need to build it somewhere sublime text Adam visual studio code these are Adam and Visual Studio code are free at a sublime text is I think how much is that right now if you want to buy that it is currently $80 one-time fee no subscription if you want to purchase it Adam and Visual Studio code are free I personally like sublime text that's the one that I use but all of these are good definitely better code editors than Dreamweaver so Dreamweaver is people wanted it to be a web design program but it never was it was a visual code editor and many many years ago it was actually when the when the web was much simpler there was a time when Dreamweaver was actually decent at writing some code if you knew how to use it a lot of people didn't know how to use it properly and so it got a bad name for itself but it was people wanted it to be a web design program but it never was it was meant for code reader coders that wanted some sort of visual interface but you still to properly use Dreamweaver you had to know code at this point the in the interface for Dreamweaver isn't that great and the coding side isn't that great either so I would just say to avoid Dreamweaver at this point if you're going to learn code learn code directly use a better code editor it doesn't have a design real design side in Dreamweaver so don't use it as a design tool use a proper design app and so-so Photoshop is can be used for web design and there's still a lot of people using Photoshop for web design but you'll see that the trend in the web design community is moving away from what from Photoshop for web design that said I'm still going to use Photoshop in my design so I'm still going to do photo editing I'm still going to create graphics it end up in websites or in emails so it's not that I don't need Photoshop at all but I might not be creating my full web or app designs in that I'll be more likely to use sketch or Adobe XD if a company's using Photoshop though for their design team then I have to use Photoshop so you can't just walk into a design studio or a company and say this is what I want to use I don't care what you use you have to fit into that company culture or that design company's culture Adobe Illustrator also because you can draw logos and icons that you could use in these other programs that's also a very useful app as well that goes into all of this we did have question in the chat also as far as WordPress goes WordPress is a content management system and it's very useful if you're coding custom themes or if you're taking an existing theme and tweaking it but WordPress is how you how you build a site it's not how you design a site so when it comes to design you're going to design it in something like sketch Adobe XD or Photoshop or illustrator you're going to design it there and then you're going to code it up you're going to custom code that using code editor you could then put that that design that you've created that you've coded into a theme and WordPress has themes that control the look and feel of the site and so with that WordPress theme that you custom code you can make a website use that theme and if you ever want to redesign the website you redesign the theme you change the code of the theme and you can update the whole site so content management systems like WordPress are great for managing the code at a site level so you can update the layout of a blog post or the layout of another kind of page and when you update that theme that layout that you have you can update it across many pages but it's not a design program so WordPress is useful for building websites but it's not useful for designing websites so it kind of brings you to should you learn to code that's a good question I think that web coding skills are useful for designers doesn't mean you have to be a coder all day long but I think that understanding how the web is built is a useful thing for designers code is just how it works how the web works so I think understanding code allows you to better understand how the web itself works doesn't mean you have to be an expert coder that you have to be the person building the websites but when I see really good designers a lot of them are familiar with the basics of how code works and they kind of understand the process that they're going to design and then the coder is going to have to turn their design into code and if you understand something about the coding process you can also communicate to developers better because if you're the designer and then somebody else has to build the website you have to hand off your design to a developer and then they have to execute it so if you can communicate with them better if there's ever any issue if something needs to change the better you can communicate with that developer to get across what needs to change that's going to make your designs turn out better because the developer ultimately implements your design and actually makes it function and you want them to take your vision and execute it properly it also the more you understand about what you can do with code you understand what's possible from a designer standpoint so you want to make sure that what you can do in a design is something that can be executed by a developer you don't want to design something that can't be built also if you don't realize that there's some cool new functionality that you could take advantage of you might not be designing for that experience years ago for example you could not do custom fonts on the web so this custom font that I have in here years ago I couldn't do it I was restricted just to just a few fonts if you didn't know that web pages got upgraded to do custom fonts you would not be using custom fonts you'd be sticking with the same old fonts that everybody's everybody had been using for years so knowing the capabilities of the web even if you don't know all the code of how to implement it but you just know the capabilities and kind of what the web can do you can design to take full advantage of what the web is capable of you also know whether something's easy or hard to implement so that makes a difference if you're on a tight budget or a tight deadline you might decide okay well that thing is going to be hard for the developer to implement so I'm not going to do it because we don't have the budget now or I don't have the time to do that right now maybe that oh that's a hard thing let's leave that to the next version of that so so I think it's useful to know at least some code as a designer and if you do learn how to code things if you want to you can design and you can build websites like for me I know both how to design and how to code websites and for me that's that's a powerful thing I can design something and build it and I can be the person that sees the whole thing through the entire experience I know that's not for everybody but it is something that's possible I do know other designers as well that like to design and like to code they like to do both sides of things so it's it's it's not necessary something everybody has to learn but the more familiar you are with code I think the more marketable you are and I think it does help long term it's it's something that if you want to learn a little bit of coding you can always just get started with just a couple little classes and maybe just spend a few hours learning some some code but if you really want to dedicate yourself to learning more about code it is it's a pretty big topic so it is going to take you a bit longer to learn that if you really want to learn how to properly build websites now there's also animation that goes along with the website as well so there's a variety of different ways you could animate it used to be in the early days that we just had animated gifs and then we got flash while Flash's died away so animated gifs have still stayed the course over all of these years animated gifs are still here for example here are some different examples of animated gifts it could be a simple thing where things just change very basically or it can be something that's a little bit more interesting so animated gifts and here's something even more a little more complicated here with things moving in the backgrounds animated gifts can be useful in webpages they're also really good in HTML emails so hTML is the coding language that we use for doing webpages and custom layout email so if you have ever gotten a nice-looking email that's been coded with a very similar thing as a webpage HTML there's some slightly different rules for web pages versus emails but animated gifs work in emails they're really the most reliable way to animate things in an email and so so animated gifs are a great thing especially in HTML email to be able to animate things and you can create them with Photoshop and After Effects I'll show you some examples of both after-effects if you're doing animation for video or animated gifts After Effects is a great animation program in general it can do video animation video effects animated gifts it can do a broad range of stuff I'll show you an example of this in in just a moment JavaScript and jQuery now this is a coding version so JavaScript is a coding language jQuery and green sock are different libraries built on top of Java scripts using Java scripts to allow you to do more interactive and animated things so for example green sock I'll show you some examples of things you can animate with green sock it's a JavaScript library specifically for animating things CSS cascading style sheets this is a technology that we use in building our webpages we build our web pages with HTML to markup our content we use CSS to style that content and as part of that styling that cascading style sheets we can do some simple animations as part of that it's not as complex as we can do with something like green sock but for simple animations CSS can provide us the ability to create some simple animations without super complex code so let's take a look at some examples so here's a basic example with something this animated gif was created with Photoshop and this I think is the classic idea of an animated gif of showing a picture showing a picture showing a picture that's fundamentally what an animated gif is like that you show a picture and then you show another picture it can be a lot more complex than that but if you want to create a simple little animated gif like this Photoshop is a great way to create an animated gif like this now this is a way more complicated type of animated gif this would be virtually impossible to create in something like Photoshop Photoshop is good it's simple little animated gifs like the previous one that we saw but Adobe After Effects is where it's at for more complex things so with all of these things moving and animating After Effects is definitely how you would create something like this now After Effects can create not only animated gifs but it can also export this stuff for video as well so if you want to create social media videos or YouTube videos anything for online video distribution whether it's TV movies social media YouTube whatever it is After Effects is kind of king of animation and video effects it's a very popular program lots of people are now learning it because there's just been a huge surge in demand for video more people are watching YouTube than are watching regular traditional television in terms of the amount of hours that people are watching so demand for video just keeps increasing and increasing you look at social media you look at your Facebook feeds you look at tick-tock you look at these different things video is that now becoming more and more the preferred format so animation programs like After Effects which allow you to do animated videos are becoming more and more in demand and we're definitely seeing a lot of demand and people wanting to take that class because all online job descriptions are now asking for people to know After Effects yeah so there was just looking in the chat for a couple questions some some people were asking about page builders like Squarespace and all throughout their Wix and stuff those kind of page building software's so they are a specific platform by themselves so like a Squarespace website it's a Squarespace website you can't really take that website somewhere else you can't I mean technically the content that's kind of in there is reusable but you can't just port it to some other hosting platform so when you're using something like Squarespace you're gonna work within their platform where they give you specific controls that they offer they they let you customize X Y & Z and that's it so if you don't want it if you want to do a B and C and they only give you XYZ then you're kind of stuck so it's they give you templates that you can slightly tweak and then beyond that you're kind of limited okay so you have to be okay with having I call it design on Rails you have to be okay with using their rails that they built in and so it's really consumer oriented it's meant for consumers that don't have design backgrounds that want to have some control over tweaking things but it's not really meant for designers now there's always a time and a place for things if you have a client that needs a website up really super quick and you don't have time to custom design a site for them then Squarespace might be fine for that you can choose one other themes which looks nice and get them up and running really quickly because they need something up very soon for a cheap amount of money and you don't always have the time to do custom designs and custom coding for every single site that's where WordPress themes come in you might choose an existing theme and just customize it a little bit you're not doing a complete full-on design in that case because it needs to be a quick cheap website that somebody gets up and running very quickly and affordably but when when it comes to truly designing your own custom experience it's going to be a custom design with custom coding and it's going to take more time and more budget when you're doing those custom things so there's there's a range of consumer to professional level type things and so page builders like Squarespace and Wix and things those are more consumer oriented tools they're not a designer's tool so I'm not going to design a website in something like square space or Wix or even WordPress is not a design program it's just meant to build a website so the design tools that I went over those are what designers are going to use not these these other things that our website page builders examples of green sake animation so green sock is a JavaScript library that lets you animate things within the webpage itself it's a coding environment so you do have to know how to do code to be able to use green sock but you can code up some pretty interesting experiences so here there's a little bit of sound effects that are in here which are cool but just look at the smooth motion of this so the frame rates really smooth now for those of you who are watching this on on Zoom I'm not sure how high the frame rates going to be as I'm as I'm going through this but it's very very smooth when you look at this in person the frame rates are very high it's very slick smooth animation and you can click on any one of these and then you get like a fruit ninja style interaction here on these you do a little swipe and so these are really fun little things that you can interact with swipe on it pretty cool so just a fun interactive site lots of animation that's fun in here as a more simple example a little bit less interactive a little bit more just simple animations you have these kind of things where there's a sequence of animations that's happening of there's Texas being typed out and buttons that are coming in high highlights of things that they want you to look at and then down here on the page there's little interactions when I mouse over and then there's other things like here for example this animation so different pieces that are moving around how would you build something like this in this case it was coated using green sock you could also do something like an animated gif or After Effects for this but this is very very smooth in its rendering and all of the rendering and everything that's going on here the smoothness of the framerate that would be very hard to do with an animated gif and to keep a small file size so while you could do something like this with an animated gif the file size of that would likely be very big for an equivalent kind of animation so they kept the animation file size much smaller by using a coded animation using green sock so sometimes you can do things multiple ways but sometimes one way will be technologically better than another the advantage of green sock is really high frame rate really high smooth quality animation at a very small file size so Google actually recommends using green sock for doing their online ad banners and you can keep a nice small file size Google Ads limit you to up to 150 K per advertisement the green sock javascript library does not count against it because they already have their own cached versions of the green sock coding library so that 150 K limit you can put all towards content images and animation code and sometimes you need to do a coded animation to get it under 150 K 150 K is not that much when it comes to an animated gif you can easily blow past that very quickly by doing an animated gif we had a question in the chat does After Effects produce a larger file size than green sock so After Effects would have to produce a video or an animated gif and yes typically a video or an animated gif is going to be a bigger file size than something like green sock the code that's being used it's it's actually rendering everything live in the browser so it's not a pre-rendered video or a pre-rendered animated gif and so the file sizes can be smaller that's the advantage of green sock the disadvantages you have to know HTML CSS and JavaScript that's the disadvantage of that so just like with everything there's pros and cons some things are easier but not maybe not quite as good in certain in certain ways and then other things are harder but may be better in certain ways it all depends on what you're going for green sock is great for animating web contents but if you're coding up something or sorry if you're animating something for video I use green sock for doing video animation I would be using After Effects for doing video animation so if I'm doing YouTube videos social media videos those want to be a video file so I'm going to be using After Effects to do video files so that's why I went over all of those because they're all they're all useful depending on what you're doing so with learning these different areas we have a couple different certificates to touch on web design or visual design the web design certificate that we have that focuses on coding and creating web graphics so in there we have our various web coding classes so for example web development level 1 level 2 flexbox javascript gets these are all things that you want to learn as a coder so that you can code websites we do also have photoshop for web in there just because Photoshop is so widely used and cross-platform if you wanted to substitute that out for things like sketch and Adobe XD we would let you do that for example we have like a sketch bootcamp that you could swap that out for if you wanted to or you could do sketch in a day and Adobe XD in a day for example so but but Photoshop in general is still a useful thing because even if you're not using it for your entire web design there's still times that you're going to be using Photoshop for maybe certain graphics that are going to go into an HTML email so in general Photoshop is still a very useful skill to have also in this web design certificate we also talked about HTML email as well so this is kind of a well-rounded you get some graphics you get some coding for web pages as well as emails if you want to focus more on the visuals and not be how to code a website the visual design certificate is more appropriate in that case so in the visual design certificate this does not focus on web coding instead this focus is on the graphics side of things so we teach Photoshop for general Photoshop Photoshop for web because some companies are still using Photoshop to do their web design so we still think it's important for a current visual designer to know Photoshop for doing web design also illustrator and in sketch so this kind of makes you well-rounded if you know Photoshop you know illustrator you know sketch this is what a lot of jobs are going to be asking for these days and then we also have graphic design and visual design so graphic design is meant to be more high-level type design so you're gonna be doing things like logos social media graphics all different types of general designs so you'll deal with color and branding and typography the visual design focuses by deep diving into web design so that's gonna specifically focus on designing websites so where is graphic design we can focus on a variety of different design projects the visual design is going to say hey let's design a website specifically so so the visual design is kind of nice overall let's learn the design tools let's learn our fundamental graphic design concepts as well as web design concepts all in one certificate program we also have a UX and UI certificate so if you're interested in the user experience side of things now user experience or UX is how things work so it's called user centered design because you want to focus on how the user is thinking about and wants to interact with this element is it good for users there can be user testing user research to understand your audience and learning about what's going to work for them and in this you learn sketch you learn the user experience side of things you get a little bit of Photoshop in Illustrator because since this is UX and UI it's still good to know some fundamentals of Photoshop and illustrator and then you get the web design bootcamp which again focuses on designing websites in particular so this is kind of a web and app focused certificate that focuses not just on user interface design but also introduces UX concepts as well so it depends on which Avenue you want to go in so it's why in the very beginning of the seminar I mentioned you have to decide what is interesting to you because there are so many different types of things you can learn that you have to decide what am i interested in what is it that gets me excited what do I think I'm going to do well when going through this now we do have certificate programs but you can also take any of those courses that are in those programs individually so we package up the programs in a certificate so it's going to give you a nice discount as well as it's a way for us to recommend to people the the courses that we think people should take but the courses that are in those certificates you can take those individually as well so when it comes to computers what might you need when buying a computer or upgrading a computer in general just any decently computer you know any decently powered Mac or PC should be fine these days now granted if you have like a ten you know fifteen year old computer you might have some issues with that especially if it was like a cheap PC from ten years ago might not work so well but for the most part as long as it's a recent decent Mac or PC for the most part you can run the software it's not like you had to not like it was years ago where you had to buy much more powerful computers and nowadays most computers sold are doing pretty well most designers just so you know out in the industry most designers use Macs now for the most part if you want to use a PC you can but just know that most designers and most design studios are more Mac centric personally I know Mac and PC so I personally prefer a Mac even though I know how to use a Windows computer and I am a designer and a developer and so I do personally prefer using Mac's but for the most part most apps are going to work both on Mac and PC now there are some apps like sketch for example or Apple's Final Cut Pro which is a video editing program they do only work on a Mac so if you want to design and sketch you're gonna have to use a Mac on the flip side PCs also can run certain apps better or only like for example AutoCAD they do make a Mac version but it's really kind of bad if you're doing AutoCAD which is doing some computer aided design so if you're doing like interior design or product design where you want very specific designs for things like designing a room and you want to size things out AutoCAD just runs so much better on a PC I wouldn't even consider running AutoCAD on a Mac and PowerPoint you do have it on a Mac and a PC but PowerPoint just clearly runs better on Windows there's certain features that are only available on the Windows version of it which is kind of ironic because PowerPoint used to be a Mac program before Microsoft bought its which is kind of funny but but nowadays since Microsoft bought it and they made the Windows version better if I was doing a lot of PowerPoint especially for companies and most of those companies are running Windows PowerPoint does run better on a PC but with those exceptions you know for the most part most like all the Adobe apps they run equally well on Mac and PC so for the most part you can run it on either Mac and PC without too many problems so and just so you know so I had while I did just recently upgrade my computer I had been running all the latest software all the latest system on my 2013 MacBook Pro so I had a 15-inch 2013 MacBook Pro so that's from 2013 so that was seven years old and it was still running all the latest software from Adobe all the latest Mac OS seven years old and it was still running decent I had 16 gigs of ram in it but so that's not a tremendous amount it was a good amount at the time but not a tremendous amount and I've been able to run all the software on it I did recently upgraded to it to a new computer because the battery and the keyboard were starting to fail after seven years of use but but for the most part I was still able to run all the software so you don't have to have the most insane highest end computer certainly any computer sold virtually nowadays as far as the Mac goes is fine on Windows I would just say don't go with the super super cheap Windows machines you know do get like if you're gonna do graphics apps get something with a decent video card don't go for like the cheapest integrated graphics if you can afford to get one with like a proper video card I would say that the biggest thing that people should look at is making sure that they get what's called a solid-state drive SSD so a solid-state drive is a much faster hard drive so instead of the old spinning regular hard drives which were more prone to failure regular hard drives were just slow new fusion new SSDs or flash memory sometimes it's called the SSDs are just so much faster nowadays a lot of laptops are going to pure SSDs and it's just the difference between booting up a computer in a few ian's versus like a minute or two it is so much faster to launch programs to do anything on your computer so if you can get an SSD instead of a regular hard drive definitely do it they still Apple still does sell like an iMac a low-end iMac with a regular hard drive that has no SSD in it I would never buy that on in Apple's computers just as a specific thing unique to Apple they do an in-between thing where they fuse together an SSD and a hard drive so hard drives are good because they're their big storage capabilities and they're cheap that's the good thing the bad thing is that they're slow SSDs the great thing is they're fast the bad thing is for getting a big amount of SSD it costs you a lot of money so so that it to be able to fuse them together and use a little bit of SSD for the speed and some hard drive for the size of the drive you get kind of a good bang for your buck so if you get one like an iMac or something or a Mac Mini with a fusion drive it kind of gives you the best of both worlds you're gonna get the speed of an SSD for your operating system and your and your apps and then you get a big hard drive in terms of size you're getting get a lot of storage most of that storage won't be super fast but for most of your data files you don't need a lot of speed Apple's going to optimize it so it puts your system and your apps on the SSD part and puts your files on the hard drive part on Windows you don't have that option on Windows it's either an SSD or a hard drive so I would definitely go for SSD whenever you can hard drives are just so slow I wouldn't get them at this point you're gonna you're gonna kick yourself if you buy just a regular sell hard drive also as a designer make sure you get what Apple calls a Retina display or the rest of the world calls like a 4k or a 5k monitor these are nice high-res displays and it's kind of like comparing to some extent like if you think about black and white monitors versus color monitors if you buy a black and white monitor you can't see color the same is true for a high-res display if you buy a low res display you cannot see things in high resolution what what high resolution means is its sharpness so if you buy a low res display the pixels are physically big you're not going to see it as much detail in that display when you buy a retina or 4k monitor you're gonna have a lot more sharpness and a lot more detail in it and when you're doing things like web graphics or even print graphics you want to see things in a higher resolution it's gonna look a lot better they do cost more money but it's definitely worth it this is where everything's going everything's going towards high res it's just a matter of when everything becomes high-res monitors it's not a matter of if it's just a matter of when so prices do keep coming down they keep coming down but definitely as a designer go for the higher res monitor you will not regret that somebody in the chat is asking if you have an older computer is there something they can do to upgrade it you do have to look at the system specs for whatever app you're going to go with so if it's sketch or if it's whatever apt like the Adobe apps you have to look at the minimum system requirements if you're just meeting the missed them the if you're just meeting the minimum system requirements you will technically be able to run the app but it might not run the best definitely adding a bit more RAM can help to speed up your computer but if you fundamentally have kind of a slow computer with a bad graphics card there's not too much you can really do to upgrade that but if you're very low RAM like if you only maybe have like two or four gigs of RAM consider adding some RAM if you can and that might help to speed it up so that you can run more programs at the same time also I think am I gonna get to this later no I might not get to it later one thing if you're doing video apps make sure that for video apps like if you're doing After Effects if you're doing Premiere Pro for video apps video apps are much more demanding so you definitely want to get a higher end computer when you're going to be doing video editing it's going to need to be rendering the videos which takes more CPU power also they graphically need more power so make sure you get a better video card when you're doing it for example don't get an integrated graphics video card make sure you get one that has a dedicated video card so you just have to look at the specs to try to to get one that's got a bit more got a bit more CPU power and and has a better video card so portfolios we talked about apps that people need to use concepts about how these things work people need to start doing the work and building a portfolio so before we talk about what goes into the portfolio let's take a look at some example portfolios it was just a variety of people's work that we can take a look at so here as I just scroll through here and I'm looking at things like Dropbox Nike Instagram Facebook already I know that this person has worked on some major projects here New Balance so if you're just looking here I know that this is a designer that probably does some good work but I can click on any one of these to learn a little bit more so we click on Nike and we take a look at some of their work so they talk about the project details who the client was there was a design team so they know how to work as part of a design team and we could take a look at things that they did so they got some early ideas for things they created a system then they created an app so we can kind of see some of their design thinking that went into here and then it leads us into the next project which is nice that it leads us right into the next thing so I can see something else tells us a little details about where it was made what the project was about what they did give some ideas in to the thought process of you know doing early ideas getting into a working prototype I like that there's a video here to see what this looks like and then talks in more details about these things so that's one example portfolio let's take a look at some others I chose a variety of different ones because it looks so different and they have a lot of different types of work here so one thing I like about this is that they're just big nice beautiful examples I don't want to see a portfolio with tiny little examples I want to see nice big examples because even if I don't click on any of these things already I can see a quality of work if I click on to an example yes I can see more but already those examples were right really nice big examples of work without me even having to click so that's one of the things that I like about that portfolio then when I get down to the bottom let's see what's down here at the bottom because there's lots of work here nice examples nice big beautiful examples here let's scroll to the bottom more projects are down here at the bottom so then I get a review of the projects and I could say oh I didn't see that one so let me click on that so it makes it very easy to go to the next project that's another thing that's important make your portfolio easy to navigate you can't get easier to navigate than this there's no navigation you just scroll up and down just be the biggest example is possible you just scroll that's all you do you just scroll up and down nice work easy to see don't have to click in to see anything more they just show the work as nice and big as possible very easy to use granted you might want to learn some more about it so they could have potentially made these things clickable to learn more about these things but to be honest with the quality of work as I'm scrolling through here I'm probably going to get in touch with this person and if I'm interested in their work asking more about it and they can always explain more about it later because the quality of work is a very apparent as I'm scrolling through this so you can't get easier than just big beautiful examples so you don't have to make a super complex portfolio if your work is strong and the work speaks for itself that's what I liked about that example a couple more here this one's a very different feel because it's very project-based so you can kind of go to a particular project and then if you click on that project you dive into it and learn more about it they have some films where you can watch some stuff they give you example graphics I like that they show you on a real device it makes it just a bit more interest in interesting than just showing like a big rectangle of the website that they actually put it on a laptop it shows photography skills or at least Photoshop skills they might not have actually been putting it into this actual photo maybe this is just a Photoshop mock-up but at least they have some photoshop skills if they don't have photography skills you can go to view out the web right there if you click on that link and at the bottom when I scroll all the way to the bottom okay so there's some Awards very good previous project next project so again it leads me into the next project if I want to read more about it and I can go through I like that there's a variety of different visuals they do like the normal kind of screen shot appearance but then they show it on some devices as well so it's a nice variation visually of not just screenshot screenshot screenshot they show me it on some actual physical devices and they could have just been purely Photoshop mock-ups or maybe they actually did some product photography it doesn't matter it just makes it kind of visually interesting that's here and one last one here there are lots of different portfolios but just wanted to show you a variety of some this one I wanted to show you because it's just a very simple portfolio so you don't have to have fancy portfolios necessarily you can have just very simple just show the work show it nice and large you can click on it to learn more in this case they have a little bit more text talking about that I like that they show some physical photography of the elements at any point I can click on the bottom right corner to get back to the grid of stuff although I do think that they could have had maybe a label for that not everybody would necessarily notice that that little grid icon is there and when I get down to the bottom let's see what happens at the bottom more projects so it does lead me into a couple additional projects as well so you want to make it easy to get from one project to the next so you're encouraging people to go from one project to the next so a couple things to think about when building portfolios those are some examples of things that you could potentially create when making your own portfolio so what goes into building a portfolio well when you're first getting started you're not going to have a lot of stuff so you want to start with a few things so maybe like three projects and just know that there's going to be more stuff you can put more into it later but start with the best stuff that you have I would rather have a few really good projects maybe have three good projects that's better to have three great projects than to have six where three of them aren't so good because if you have three of them that aren't so good I'm thinking 50% of the time you're not such a great designer versus if you have three great projects you're 100% good even though you only have three things you want to lead with your best work it can it can be practical like sorry not practice it can be practice or fictional projects just say that they're a concept it doesn't have to be a real thing if I see somebody have a good concept if they're a good designer it doesn't really matter whether it was a real project or not as long as they're a good designer some people that are on doing real-life projects that they're there they're technically real projects they were paid for them they were for clients but the client has certain restrictions and they can't do a great design job that's not necessary good portfolio work yeah was a real thing but it really wasn't very good because the maybe the client limited what you could do and you couldn't shine you couldn't show off your true design talent maybe you can show off your real design talent in a concept piece I don't care whether it's real or not personally I just want to see good design when I'm looking at things now if it's good design and for a real life project great that's that's the best of both worlds as an example I know when I graduated from college I'll never forget this story so I graduated from college and I was going around showing my portfolio to different places and there was a famous design studio was a worldwide design studio and I dropped off my portfolio for them to take a look at and I had a project that was a real printed project and in my college I was I was chosen as as a student it was going to be assigned this real like paid project so somebody came to the college and said I have a real project I want you to choose one of your students I'm gonna pay them and they're gonna do a real project and it's going to get printed it was a CD jewel case so it was gonna be the CD was printed and the the case lining was going to be printed I was a whopping one color job because I didn't have a huge budget that's why they were going after college student work but I was so excited because I was the one that was selected I got to do that project it got printed it was real it was my first real printed piece and I was so excited I put in my portfolio because I'm like this is real it's real design I was paid for it was printed it's real it wasn't really good because I did the best I could do for that client but it was just one one one color job it you know there were certain restrictions that the client made me do so I did the best I could do within the constraints but it wasn't a great example of what I could do as a designer and so when the person reviewing my portfolio looked at it she said she said why is this in your portfolio and I told her the story and how it was my real first work and she's like it's the worst thing in your portfolio it's not that great it's basically I forget exactly that what she said but she basically gave me the idea that that's the worst thing in my portfolio and even though it was real I probably shouldn't have it in my portfolio she didn't say it in that many words but I got the picture so I would rather have good work than real work so I'd rather have a whole portfolio of conceptual pieces that are gonna blow me away as long as they're realistic and they show me what somebody could do I want to see good design versus practical stuff so if you need ideas just think of anything that businesses need social media graphics email promotions anything that you see from a business you could design those things it could be a conceptual piece maybe you see something that a business sends out you're like oh that's not very good I could do that better redesign it put in your portfolio redesign a restaurant website do their menu do their do a logo anything needs you see that's out there redesign it come up with a new idea you could come up with a completely fictional business that you imagine or you could take an existing business and do something for them and you know you could offer it to them if you want to potentially and maybe even make some money that way but ultimately you're doing it for your portfolio piece you want to do something that is good enough to put in your portfolio and you're just using something from real life to be inspired to do something find practical projects if you want to get a job if you want to show clients or work that you've done to try to get them to pay you to do that think of the things that you want to be doing and do those things okay and so this this is gonna work regardless of whether you're doing it for potential client work because you want to get a client to hire you or whether it's going to be for for a company that you want to get a job for because you want to show anybody that you can do these things if you're going directly for client work they want to see examples of what you've done for other people so that they can imagine what what you're gonna do for them okay so always kind of think of the purpose of are you trying to get client work or are you trying to get a job at a company as far as how you kind of present this within your portfolio and ultimately if it's something that interests you that's going to make you more excited and you're gonna want to do it more so choose something that you're passionate about or something you're interested in so for example Jonas Rogan he graduated from our web design certificate and he created a bunch of websites now since then and works on a bunch of different projects but when he was going through our certificate program he learned how to do these things and then he created this website called boast for best of astoria so a story is a story of Queens I used to actually live in a story of Queens and it's a it's a cool neighborhood in in Queens and there's a bunch of stuff to do and so he created a website for things to do in Astoria boast best of Astoria dot NYC it's a great domain name that he got by the way and he just designed this website and he's got a blog running on there and it's things you can see like okay you want to go to eat in Astoria well here's places you can go to here's the best Brazilian place didn't even actually know that there were presenting places in Astoria but it's it's a classically Greek area it used to be I don't know if it's still true but it used to be the second highest population of Greeks outside of Greece very high Greek population I think it's changed since then but still a lot of Greek influence in that area so the best Greek places that you can go to t want to go get a drink you can go to drink and check out you know the best bubble tea in the area and so it's a cool thing that he was interested in he actually put out questionnaires the people gathered the information collected it made it useful and put up a blog and this is something that people were using in Astoria to learn of things to do and it was something that he learned a lot along the way and it's a real thing and the thing is if you're interested in a topic whether it's your local area or something if you're interested in it when a client is talking to you or a prospective employer is talking to you and they want you to tell them something about the project you're gonna be able to speak passionately and knowledgeably about that area that you're interested in like for example one of my friends on facebook she's really into knitting and so if she was getting into web design for example I would say create a website for knitting because you love knitting you know all about knitting you're gonna really know what would make a good knitting web sites and that should be something that you should do so choose something that interests you and maybe it's a real thing maybe it becomes like an actual thing that takes off and becomes its own thing for example unsplash.com interesting story behind unsplash this was created by a design studio the design studio had some extra leftover photography and they just thought oh this is a shame that it's going to waste let's post it on a website we'll call it unsplash and we'll just let people download it for free because we're not gonna use it for anything so let's just make it up make up this website post it there and then they let other people submit photos there as well and so more people started giving photos and more people started giving photos and now this is just a place to get nice free high-res photos there are tons of photos on here so many photos so first of all as a designer this is a useful thing for you to know unsplash.com but also unsplash raises money so they raised over seven million dollars to to do more stuff so they're now a venture capital based thing oh look they raised 10 over 10 million of funding this side thing I think is probably in the design studio that created it originally so it's kind of crazy that this like little side thing became a big thing now I'm not saying that that's gonna happen to your little side thing like the best of a story or website it's probably not going to be a 10 million dollar website but you never know and the idea is just it if you do something that's interesting maybe it has a life of its own but it gives you a reason to want to do it and maintain it and talk intelligently and passionately about that project to employers and clients and you learn a lot and and you're willing to see it through because it's something that's interesting to you so it's kind of a good question what is something you're interested in doing that you think would be a great project whether it's a website or whatever it is whatever design you want to get into are you going to do a logo you know just think about what you're passionate about that you could use to build a portfolio piece and think about the things it would be good in your portfolio and do those pieces do a logo to an identity system do an animation do a website whatever it is that's what you can do okay so final thoughts for wrapping up here design as much as you can practice makes perfect the more you do the better you're going to get and have fun you want design as a cool thing it's a fun medium animating creating graphics it's an awesome thing it's a fun enjoyable thing that's why designers like our jobs it's like we like doing what we like to do as I said before we are offering in-person classes here in New York City once everything kind of gets settled down with the coronavirus we'll be back to doing in-person classes in the meantime though we have live streaming interactive classes I know the seminar was a lecture style kind of seminar but our other classes that we're doing those are interactive hands-on classes that we offer and they they come with workbooks which are step-by-step exercises that people are going through so you learn and you do in those type of more longer form paid classes we have classes on graphic design on web design user interface design for example the series on the Adobe apps like InDesign and illustrator and so forth that's coming up I'm going to be teaching those and we also there's another seminar that's going to be coming up that if you want to see all of our seminars by the way because we're doing free seminars here every day every business day during the coronavirus stay at home movement if you go to our website and go over to the little menu on the right-hand side and go to free seminars this is a list of upcoming free seminars I'm going to be doing how to get started in web design specifically if you want to learn how to code up a website and make a website go live that's a great seminar that you can check out but we have a bunch of other ones that are coming up as well I'm going to be teaching this one in particular so we hope to see you again in a future seminar and consider taking one of the the online classes if you want to dive deeper into one of those those are all hands-on classes and for the time being we're using zoom to do it online we've always actually for years now we've been offering online as an option we've gone solely online now during the the coronavirus time but but we've even once that's done we'll offer the in person and live online we'll continue to offer both once things kind of get back to normal that we can offer both but we're still going to continue to offer the live online right now we're just solely live online they are held New York City time so Eastern Time you do its attend live during those hours because you're gonna watch the instructor talk about things and then they're going to give you assignments so that you can do the hands-on part because it's important for you to learn and do those things we also have during this Korona time a coronavirus time we've extended our six-month retake window up to a year so that if you take a class during this time if you want to retake that class for free within one year you can retake it either online or by coming physically to ennoble desktop once we start offering in-person classes again you could retake that for free by coming to the to the in-person class as well and just want to thank everybody for for showing up today appreciate it hope to see you in future online seminar whether I'm teaching it or somebody else's and thank you for coming everybody and hope you enjoyed and got some information out don't forget that this URL here this is I'm gonna paste it into the chat for those of you who are attending live and for those of you who are watching they're recording if you're watching this on YouTube I'll have it in the video description down below the video and that's all the information so you can click on the links view those websites read the information again and reference it later on so thank you so much for for joining us today and hope you got some some useful information out of this so that you can start your your career just think what is it that you want to do there's lots of different areas InDesign which one's right for you which one are you most passionate about figure that out learn how to do it build a portfolio and that's how you get started

Channel: Noble Desktop

Views: 56,912

Keywords: Noble Desktop, Graphic Design, Web Design, Logo Design, Animation, Visual Design, UI/UX Design, Graphic Design Portfolio

Id: k0EyAs9Q4NI

Length: 97min 23sec (5843 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020