You will also need a working knowledge of desktop design software, such as Illustrator, InDesign etc., and image-editing packages such as Photoshop. A good foundation in graphic design theory and practical application will help you hit the ground running. If you are passionate about design and have a desire to learn, you can learn on your own by making use of plenty of resources and graphic design tutorials available online. One obvious way to learn graphic design is to attend a design school and commit to a degree course.
With internet pervading all aspects of our lives, role of graphic designers has increased to include designing online ads, social media posts, sales pages for product releases or email series to up sell services and more. Companies hire the services of graphic designers to design all this and much more. Be it a logo or brochure or website or signage or magazines or business cards or leaflets, all use graphics to draw attention of potential customers. Graphic Design plays a big role in modern businesses and our everyday lives in many ways, it is clearly an important form of communication between a business and its audience or consumers. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words in current times when the whole world has shifted towards digital space, we can say that a good graphic design is worth a thousand dollars in any business. Learn Adobe Photoshop from Scratch (Udemy) Learn the Entire Affinity Suite: Photo, Designer & Publisher (Udemy) Adobe CC Masterclass: Photoshop, Illustrator, XD & InDesign (Udemy) UI / UX Design Specialization by CalArts (Coursera)
Google UX Design Professional Certificate (Coursera) Become a Graphic Designer (LinkedIn Learning – Lynda) Graphic Design Elements for Non-Designers Specialization by University of Colorado Boulder (Coursera)
Graphic Design Masterclass – Learn Great Design (Udemy) Graphic Design Specialization by CalArts (Coursera) The chart below shows a quick checklist of when to use each program.
Adobe offers tutorials on how to use InDesign and Illustrator, as well as how to buy the programs, right on their website. If you’re thinking about venturing into the design world, be sure you know how to efficiently use each of these programs. This is generally not a problem, unless you have a document that happens to be 30 pages long and you decide to insert a new one after page 3 – then you have to manually re-number the pages. It also has more powerful drawing capabilities than InDesign.Ī slight downfall to Illustrator is it cannot automatically implement multiple page or page numbers. Illustrator is great to use when you want to create depth perception because it allows you to create multiple layers. When it comes to resizing photos, it is best to use Photoshop.
It is also good to use when you want to make your company logo very large, as Illustrator and InDesign will not distort the image.
Illustrator is best used for Website designs, logos and full page designs. Illustrator is also a vector based program so it uses the same foundation concept as InDesign, but it is used for different types of projects.
InDesign should be used for larger, multiple page documents, or PDF presentations.
The great thing about InDesign is its ability to combine artwork from Illustrator and Photoshop to create multiple page spreads and layouts. InDesign allows you to create “master pages” so you can easily create a booklet or magazine layouts with consistent design and automatic page numberings. InDesign is great to use when you need to create multiple pages that you want to look uniformed. InDesign is a vector based program, meaning that it uses a mathematical grid to map artwork and the artwork is scalable, meaning that you can resize the file as small or as large as you want without losing the quality of the image or making it grainy. For the purpose of this blog, we will mainly be focusing on InDesign and Illustrator. In order to be a good graphic designer, you have to know the differences between the three and when is the best time to use each program. There are so many programs out there for graphic designers to use but the three most popular are Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.