Graphic Design Tutorials

It seems my design skills have begun to lag because I don't use them as much as I used to and as my son told me about writing, and, which in truth applies to everything, graphic design is a perishable skill. So, I started working tutorials during my downtime. Right now I am doing Photoshop tutorials. I can't wait to get to Illustrator. I had the most fun back in the day drawing logos in Freehand. I can't draw a lick, mind you, but with a mouse, I created some fantastic logos—even with the little knowledge I had in graphic design. In fact, when I started, this field didn't have a name. It was eventually referred to as desktop publishing. I'm not nearly as good at drawing with Photoshop but I guess that is a matter of practice more than anything. I stopped "drawing" for a few years so I haven't experienced the totally awesome capabilities of Illustrator but I look forward to it.

I came to design via work as a journalist, then editor, them press chief. I bought my first Mac in 1991 and bought QuarkXPress 3.1 and Freehand. It came with a word processor, WriteNow, a spreadsheet (don't remember the name), and some other goodies. I later bought Filemaker. If memory serves and you know how memory is, I am talking about the days when initial memory was 4 mb, upgradable to 8 mb and the hard drive was 40mb, with a 9" screen. Yes, you read that right—not a gig in sight. I considered my Mac a "portable" desktop because I could carry it, the keyboard and the mouse in one hand. Cost? $1,500. My clients were amazed I could run Quark and Freehand on this little machine.

The office I worked at in the late 1980s (how long ago was that?) had DOS-based machines running Multi-mate, Wordstar and dBase. Ancient history isn't it? We had one machine for "desktop publishing" and we had one program, some cumbersome nightmarish thing whose name escapes me and whose abilities were left behind by an early version of MS Word. And the crashes! Good grief.

I loved Quark and Freehand for a good long time but had to give up Freehand when I moved to California. That was Illustrator territory. I gave up Quark when I bought CS2 while taking some courses at a community college in Arizona in 2006. In some ways, I still prefer Quark, probably because I used it for so long and know it so well (Q5 and earlier) but it falls so far short of InDesign, starting with not having a dynamic spell checker and now a spell checker (Q7) that doesn't even know how to spell and can't be taught nearly as well as its predecessors. Because I do a lot of text corrections, I see things when I'm spell checking and either have to write them down or quit spell check and then spell check from the beginning. That's a chore I would rather not have.

Even though I came to graphic design from journalism, I started "designing" as a pre-teen, with a typewriter. I used to wish for a typewriter that did everything. When I bought my first Mac, I realized I finally had one. I even named it—Freedom Express. (That's a story for another time.)

Before scanners became ubiquitous, I had a fax machine and a Global Village modem. I used to fax drafts of designs and logos to my computer and then use Freehand to recreate/finalize them.

Before laser printers, I printed my business card finals two to four times their size on my inkjet printer and let the printer size them down so the resolution would be right.

As I upgraded my Macs, I gave the previous one to my daughter who also loves Mac. My son, on the other hand, learned to used it from his baby sister and wasn't that keen on it. He has made up for that by being a totally tech windows-based, social media networking genius.

Well, these intro Blogs always seem to get too long so let me cut this off here. I plan to make the future blogs shorter and to spend the time with techniques and tutorials. I won't write them, I just want to share what I'm learning get those links out there because I have found hundreds and they are wonderful. Even simple ones teach something. Even if they are for a higher version of CS than I have, I do what I can and don't worry about it. Learning is the key.

I couldn't resist creating that vintage Mac and then I thought I'd go a step further with a Hypercard screen.