With so many new tools available for editing images and video, it can’t be too long before we start teaching elements of graphic design as a core competency in school. Until then, design is still something most of us have to seek out on our own.

In my experience, graphic design is a field in which you sink or swim based largely on the quality of your portfolio. This means it’s possible to become a professional in the field without necessarily having to go back to school. I did this myself over the last few years, but some recent developments have made it easier than ever to teach yourself design on a budget. Here’s what I’d do if I had to do it again today.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Price: $50

The hardest part of trying to learn graphic design on my own was first getting my hands on a copy of professional-level tools. At the time, Photoshop alone would set you back almost $1000. The entire Creative Suite would probably have cost more than the computer you’d run it on. I ended up talking someone in the graphics department at work into letting me borrow an old copy of Photoshop when the department upgraded, but today, that wouldn’t be necessary.

A few weeks ago, Adobe announced the Creative Cloud, a new subscription based model for their tools. From the literature on the Creative Cloud site, in
a few weeks it will be possible to get your hands on full versions of ALL of Adobe’s CS6 tools for just $50 a month. This is a huge deal for anyone
wanting to learn or use these tools on a budget. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign…finally professional level tools are affordable for everyone.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Lynda.com

Price: Basic Subscription – $25, Premium Subscription  - $37.50

Once you get your hands on the right tools, though, you still need someone to show you how to use them. Enter Lynda.com.

Lynda.com is a huge online library of training videos for hundreds of modern tools. They have entire courses by experts in all kinds of things from Twitter to Microsoft Word to Adobe After Effects. The best part is that for the price of just $25 a month, you can have access to ALL of their videos. Watch as many as you want as many times as you want. And for just a little more a month you can get access to exercise files so you can follow along with the videos as you watch.

Lynda.com already has tons of videos ready to go for Adobe CS6, so you know the information is up to date. And they have courses that can take you from
beginner all the way up to advanced skills.

I taught myself Photoshop using YouTube videos and other stuff I found online. But then I found out about Lynda.com and used it to learn Illustrator and
InDesign. I highly prefer the structured content and video quality at Lynda.com to any other method.

Lynda.com

Required Reading

Price: As much as you want to spend

There’s one more essential piece of the puzzle for becoming a graphic designer. Knowing HOW to use the tools is one thing. Knowing WHAT to do with those
tools is something completely different. In order to learn that, you have to expose yourself to as much design theory and examples of good work as you
can. You can get a good amount of that just browsing the internet these days, but to really succeed you need to study. That means hitting the books and then practicing what you learn by trying to reproduce good works yourself.

I’ve found that most public libraries are lacking when it comes to design texts, so I’m gonna recommend you use the rest of your monthly budget to
actually buy some design books. I constantly want to refer back to mine so I really prefer to own them anyway. Here are a few suggestions to get your
collection started.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

Graphic Design: the New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips

Univeral Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler

Visual Language for Designers by Connie Malamed

Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton

Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type by Kimberly Elam

Everything by Edward Tufte

If your intention is to become a presentation designer you need to read everything by Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. (If you haven’t already.)

[Image Credit: SeemingLee]

I’ve been playing around with a new iPad app for a few days and just have to tell you about it. It’s one of the most fun tools for teaching digitally that I’ve come across. Watch the video above to see a little of what it can do.

(By the way, I’m working on getting the featured videos to show up in my RSS feed, so if you’re an RSS subscriber, please bear with me. I hope to have that done by the end of the week.)

As you can see from the video, it’s called Doodlecast Pro. It makes it really simple to record your voice along with doodles, annotations, and any pictures from your camera roll. It comes with tons of preset backgrounds like lined paper, grid paper, music staves, sports fields, or even storyboards. And it makes sharing your recorded videos really easy.

Perhaps the best thing about the app is its price. At just $$3.99 it’s significantly cheaper than Apple’s Keynote and much more natural to use, in my opinion.

Paired with an iPad Digital AV Adapter  or with Airplay to a Mac or Apple TV, I think this app has the potential to change the way teachers or speakers share with their audiences. I’d love to see some innovative presentations using Doodlecast Pro in the future, perhaps a little like this one.

I also look forward to seeing what additional capabilities they add to the app in later versions.

Incidentally, I’ve also been using the Cosmonaut iPad stylus for a while now and it works really well with Doodlecast Pro. I like that it feels more like a whiteboard marker than a pen, which is better for the type of writing and drawing that I do on the iPad.

Salman Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a website where you can learn just about anything for free.

The following is a quote from his TED talk (watch it in full below) when Salman is explaining his cousins’ feedback after receiving his tutoring via a YouTube video instead of face to face:

“They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person…They preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first that’s very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin without feeling like they’re wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of years ago or maybe a couple of years ago they don’t have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos.

“If they’re bored they can go ahead, they can watch it at their own time at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you’re trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying do you understand this.”

So much of what he says makes sense.

And I love Sal’s story. Stumbling on a great thing, turning it into a company, quitting his job, adoption by school systems…

Just amazing. Is this the future of education? Could you get your GED simply by taking Khan Academy classes for free? Could college educations eventually be free online, too? This is just another example of video on the internet is driving innovation and has the power to transform entire industries.

(via swiss-miss)