If you’re new to graphic design and want to get started I tell anyone that asks me to first find something they want to build out that they are passionate about. I got started in design because I’m a skate rat at heart. I wanted to put all of my friends and I on the internet to show everyone how good we were at skating and I wanted it to ‘look cool.’
I don’t know what came first, me wanting to build a website with something like Angelfire.com or me wanting to design things with photos of me skating that my friend Jbo shot, either way the point of this is that you should take something you’re already passionate about and work on that as you learn because there’s nothing more annoying than creating things that don’t matter to you.
Learn because you’re motivated by your own passion.
Now that that is understood, I’m going to start with Photoshop. Adobe design software is Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign those are the 3 hitters that any employer will want you to be proficient at. Everyone kind of lies about being proficient in InDesign though cause it’s something that you can learn the ins and outs of in one night once you mastered the other two.
Adobe Photoshop
How do you install Photoshop? Well you gotta pay for it monthly, but there is a free trial, so if you’re super cheap create like 10 e-mail address and sign up for the free trials every time one runs out or simply pay $9.99 a month for it.
I wish I could actually get into teaching you something in this post, but there’s some technical stuff you should know before getting started. Your machine should have at least 8gb of RAM in it, and I recommend Macintosh. If you have a PC cool, but know that I’m on a Mac.
Once you installed Photoshop you’ll see this:
This is your welcome dialog. It’s asking you what kind of document do you want to work in. Here is one thing even designers with degrees forget that is super important:
Resolution, DPI, or PPI, make sure that you understand the 2 major resolutions.
72 DPI is for anything that is going to live on the internet.
300 DPI is for anything that is going to print.
Remember that, write that down, make it a song, anything so that you don’t accidentally send a 72 DPI document to a printer, you’ll be tremendously disappointed in the quality, and if you’re employed by someone, you might get fired. I’d fire you if you made that mistake. That’s why I’m making that 101 of graphic design.
For the sake of this introduction we will work on a 72 DPI document in pixels. Let’s make a 2000 x 2000px document.
The file size for this document will be under 1 MB if saved out as a JPEG, if saved out with transparency it could be anywhere between 2-8 MB.
The reason I’m telling you about the file size is because websites perform better with images that are under 1MB in size.
Google will rank your website better because it loads fast.
1 MB will load faster than 7 MB. Note that down too.
You got a square document, perfect for Instagram or a product image on your web store. What do you want to make? Your answer should be anything. You should be excited right now, ready to explore a program’s interface like some archeologist in a newly discovered tomb in Egypt. Get ready, filters, effects, adjustments, tools and masks are going to populate your brain in a matter of time.
Start your learning journey by having fun with what you don’t know anything about.
Once I got done writing this blog I realized that this is better off as a video, but I’m going to keep what I have here in case you’re more of a reader anyway. If you have any questions reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or leave a comment below. I promise to do more of these intro to design posts.
