this manual is easy to every graphic designer to read and study about graphic design
they can practise the missing part in their life and read about it
it help them to know more and deep about it
this manual is easy to every graphic designer to read and study about graphic design
they can practise the missing part in their life and read about it
it help them to know more and deep about it
this manual is easy to every graphic designer to read and study about graphic design
they can practise the missing part in their life and read about it
it help them to know more and deep about it
zeros How to become a designer without going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
Karen X. Cheng
BLOG
How to become a designer without going to
design school
JUNE 19, 2013 BY KAREN
Update: I first published this blog post over a year ago. The books | reference
in this guide are classics, but some of the online tutorials are out of date. If
you find great online tutorial resources or outdated information in this
guide, please email me at karenxcheng (at) gmail (dot) com with
suggestions so I can update this post. Thank you!
I got my job as a designer without going to design school. I had
hacked together my own design education in 6 months while
working a full-time job. I didn’t think I was ready but started
applying for jobs anyway — and got a job at a great startup, Exec.
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! weazo How tobecome designer wit going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
To be clear, I’m nowhere near as good as those design prodigies that
come out of a 4-year education at an elite school like RISD. But I’m
definitely good enough to do my job well. I’m the only designer at
Exec, so I do a pretty wide range of things — visual and interaction
design, print, web, and mobile app design.
Maybe you want to change careers and become a designer full-time
Or you want to learn some basics for your startup or side project.
This is a guide to teach yourself design.
Step 1. Learn to see
The biggest mistake is jumping into Photoshop too fast. Learning
Photoshop does not make you a designer, just like buying
paintbrushes does not make you an artist. Start with the
foundation.
First, learn how to draw.
You don’t have to sit in a room with a bunch of other artists
trying to draw a naked woman.
You don’t even have to get that good at drawing. Just learn some
basics so you can be comfortable sketching with a pen.
You only have to do one thing to learn how to draw: get the book
You Can Draw in 30 days and practice for half an hour every day
for a month. I’ve looked at a lot of drawing books and this is one
of the best.
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! anezeros How to become a designer without going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
Learn graphic design theory
« Start with the book Picture This. It’s a story book of Little Red
Riding hood, but will teach you the foundations of graphic design
at the same time.
« Learn about color, typography, and designing with a grid. If you
can find a local class to teach the basics of graphic design, take it.
« Go through a few of these tutorials every day.
Learn some basics in user experience
« There are a lot of books about user experience. Start with these
two quick reads that will get you in the right mindset:
¢ The Design of Everyday Things
« Don’t Make Me Think!
Learn how to write
« Here is a sure sign of a bad designer: their mockups are filled with
placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum. A good designer is a good
communicator. A good designer thinks through the entire
experience, choosing every word carefully. Write for humans
Don’t write in the academic tone you used to make yourself sound
smart in school papers.
Read Made to Stick, one of my favorite books of all time. It will
teach you how to suck in your readers
« Voice and Tone is a website full of gems of good writing examples
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! anazo How tobecome designer wit going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
Step 2. Learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator
Hooray! Now you’ve got a pretty solid foundation — both visual and
UX. You’ re ready to learn Photoshop. Actually, I recommend
starting with Illustrator first and then moving on to Photoshop
after. Illustrator is what designers use to make logos and icons.
Learn Illustrator
« There area ton of books, online tutorials and in-person classes to
learn Illustrator. Choose the style that works best for you. Here
are the books I found especially helpful to learn the basics of
Illustrator:
Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book - It’s boring, but if you get
through at least half of it, you’1l know your way around Illustrator
pretty well,
Vector Basic Training - This book teaches you how to make things
in Illustrator that actually look good.
Now for the fun stuff! Follow these online tutorials and be
impressed by what you can make. Here are two my favorites — a
logo and a scenic landscape
Learn Photoshop
¢ There are a million and one tutorials out there. A lot of them are
crap. Fortunately, there are sites with really high quality
tutorials. PSDTuts by TutsPlus is one of them
« Here’s a good photoshop tutorial to make an iPhone app.
« Here’s another good photoshop tutorial to create a website
mockup.
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! a6aanors How lo become a designe with sing to design schol Kren X. Cheng
« Carve out an hour or two every day to go through some tutorials,
and you’ ll be impressed by how quickly you progress
Step 3. Learn some specialties
Do you want to design mobile apps? Websites? Infographics?
Explore them all, and pick and choose the ones you enjoy to get
better at them.
Learn Logo Design
« Learn how to make a logo that doesn’t suck: Logo Design Love
« You’ll want to take it a step further than a logo though. Learn to
create a consistent brand — from the website to the business
cards. Check out this book, Designing Brand Identity.
Learn Mobile App Design
Start with this tutorial to get your feet wet on visual design for
mobile apps
Read this short but very comprehensive and well-thought out
book on iPhone design: Tapworthy. It will teach you how to make
an app that not only looks good but is easy to use
Geek out on the apps on your phone. Critique them. What works
and what doesn’t?
Learn Web Design
« Read Don’t Make Me Think to learn how to make a website that
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! 816azo How tobecome designer wit going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
people find easy to use and navigate.
« Read The Principles of Beautiful Web Design if you want help
making a website look good
« Make a list of the websites you think are beautifully designed
Note what they have in common.
Now for the hairy question of whether you need to know HTML/CSS
as a designer: It depends on the job. Knowing it will definitely give
you an edge in the job market. Even if you don’t want to be a web
developer, it helps to know some basics. That way you know what is
possible and what isn’t.
There are so many great resources to learn HTML and CSS:
« My favorite free one is Web Design Tuts
« My favorite paid one (pretty affordable at $25/month) is
Treehouse. If you’re starting from the beginning and want
someone to explain things clearly and comprehensively, splurge
for Treehouse tutorials.
Step 4. Build your portfolio
You don’t need to go to a fancy design school to get a job asa
designer. But you do need a solid portfolio.
How do you build a portfolio if you’re just starting out for the first
time? The good news is you don’t need to work on real projects with
real clients to build a portfolio. Make up your own side projects.
Here are a few ideas:
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! aizeros How to become a designer without going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
Design silly ideas for t-shirts.
Find poorly designed websites and redesign them.
Got an idea for an iPhone app? Mock it up
Join a team at Startup Weekend and be a designer on a weekend
project
Enter a 99 designs contest to practice designing to a brief.
Do the graphic design exercises in the Creative Workshop book.
Find a local nonprofit and offer to design for free.
Resist the temptation to include every thing you’ve ever designed in
your portfolio. This is a place for your strongest work only.
Steal, steal, steal at first. Don’t worry about being original — that
will come later, once you are more comfortable with your craft.
When you learn a musical instrument, you learn how to play other
people’s songs before composing your own. Same goes for design.
Steal like an artist.
Go to Dribbble for inspiration on some of the best designers. Check
out pttrns for iOS inspiration, and patterntap for website
inspiration.
Step 5: Get a job as a designer
When |! first started learning design, I went to a job search
workshop for designers. I walked into a room full of designers who
had much more experience than I did - 5, 10, 15 years experience.
All of them were looking for jobs. That was intimidating. There |
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! m6aanors How lo become a designe with sing to design schol Kren X. Cheng
was, trying to teach myself design, knowing I was competing with
these experienced designers.
And yet 6 months later, I got a design job. There was one key
difference between me and many of the other designers that gave
me an edge: I knew how to work with developers
The biggest factor to boost your employability is to be able to work
with developers. Learn some interaction design. Learn some basic
HTML and CSS. Designers in the tech industry (interaction
designers, web designers, app designers) are in extremely high
demand and are paid well. That’s where the jobs are right now.
If you don’t have any experience working with developers, get
some. Go to Startup Weekend, go to hackathons, or find a developer
through a project collaboration site
Make a personal website and make your portfolio the centerpiece.
Go out and make serendipity happen - tell everyone you know that
you’re looking for a job as a designer. You never know who might
know someone
Research companies and agencies you might be interested in. Look
on LinkedIn for 2nd and 3rd degree connections to people who work
at those companies and ask for intros. The best way to get a job is
through a connection. If you don’t have a connection, there’s still a
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became--desgner-witho-gcing-to-design-schoal! atszeros
How to become a designer without going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
lot you can do to give yourself an edge.
Once you’ve got the job, keep learning
I’ve been at Exec for a year now and have learned a ton on the job. I
seek out designers who are much more talented than I am, and
learn from them. I find design classes (good online ones are
Skillshare, General Assembly, Treehouse, and TutsPlus). I work on
side projects. | geek out at the design section of bookstores. There is
still so much to learn and to improve on
Keep your skills sharp, and always keep learning.
Questions? Say hi at @karenxcheng.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, | wish
someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get
into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap.
For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that
good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is
still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints
you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
Most people | know who do interesting, creative work
went through years of this. We know our work doesn't
have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go
hipslwww karenx.contloghaw-o-became-a-desgner-witho-qcing-to-design-schoal! otzeros
How to become a designer without going to design schoo | Karen X. Chang
through this. And if you are just starting out or you are
still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the
most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s
gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You've just
gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass