Graphic Design Instructor
The campus Literary and Arts Magazine, The Wire Harp, is available, for free, at popular locations on campus and online. It showcases intriguing stories, poetry, and visual images created by our SFCC folks.
Graphic design is something best learned by observing, researching, and doing.
Feed Your Brain — Learn to Search
Use your favorite search engine to find graphics-related web pages. Build a bookmark library. Google “graphic design” for a start.
Use iTunes and its podcast directory. Start with a search for Graphic Design. Try out the sites you find. Watch the list of similar podcasts that will accompany each podcast you visit. Subscribe to your favorites.
The Inland Northwest Multimedia User Group meets downtown at SIRTI; sponsored by Adobe. A good local learning opportunity.
The School of Visual Arts in New York. History and interviews.
Design Matters, Debbie Millman’s thoughtful interviews.
The Design View; powerful thinking.
Von Glitschka, a Salem, OR-based illustrator offers very cool art, bold commentary, and lifestyle inspiration.
36 Point, the Young and the Ruthless!
The Design Observer. The “establishment” design site. They are chummy with the AIGA.
Communication Arts, Print, How; some of the design magazines.
Adobe makes most of our software. Try Adobe TV for interesting graphics viewing. They also have free courses in Print, Web and Video.
The bulk of inspiration for designers of printed materials is available in print; books and magazines devoted to print design. You will find philosophical discussions, business practices, and nuts and bolts tips on the web, but nothing beats paper for delivering good print design inspiration. Our course textbooks, the History of Graphic Design by Phillip Meggs and Graphic Design Solutions by Robin Landa are two huge sources.
Web Standards are highly recommended for designers; they are required by law for many clients.
Who creates standards? The W3C.
Look over Max Design's Standards Checklist.
The "Whole Meal Deal"...the people who make the Opera browser have created a free web design course; it is pretty neat!! (their Web Developer area is good, also.) Another Web curriculum is available from Adobe.
Are you a decorator or a designer? Sara Horton's online book, Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers, will help you understand what the Web is all about and possibly redefine your approach to “Design.”
There are thousands of great minds working together to share web knowledge. Below is a short list. As you visit these sites you will discover many more. My apologies to those I haven't listed.
A great reference-tutorial site, SitePoint.
Listen to podcasts. Real Web Designers talking shop; what they do, what they eat, how they talk. Boagworld.com, the Web in Focus, the Webmaster Jam Sessions, dConstruct, etc.; great, great stuff.
Every web designer should study Jakob Nielsen. His cause is USEABILITY, stressing streamlined user interfaces and NO EXTRA IMAGES. Agree or disagree with him, but you need to know who he is.
My working collection of neat links on web design...
Ads of the World, this is an open-source, non-credentialed, international forum. Imagine a room full of monkeys, throwing criticism at advertisements.
LogoPond, the Webbys, Dailypoetics (read the business cards from Portland's Sandstrom Design), and ideasonideas are some nice diversions.