Tutorials On Graphic Design

[Carmina Piette]

Youcan put tutorial work in your portfolio provided you explain that it is tutorial work. Alas, I don't know if that would gain you much in an interview. The fact that you can finish a tutorial doesn't necessarily translate into design and problem solving skills which is what the person looking at your portfolio wants to see.

Besides, taking someone else's work, changing it a bit, and presenting it as completely your own, wouldn't that be deception or fraud, or piracy at the least? Making an image for a tutorial takes way more skills than just the steps described in that tutorial. By presenting the work as your own, you present false proof of having those skills.

My suggestion would be to do the tutorial using the files and steps they give you, then use the techniques you've learned to create something that is your own. It will show much better in your portfolio and it might not be as easy to recognize as a tutorial.

Most of the creative people who are going to review your portfolio for a job are probably poking around the design sites, and reading the magazines you got the tutorial from anyway. So, if you just include the tutorial files in your portfolio, they will probably recognize it pretty quickly.

But rather than hiding the fact that your works are tutorial-based, which could be considered deceit and grounds for disqualification (from jobs, contests, etc.), I suggest you address the tutorial works directly, explaining why you included them and what you gained. It's professional, sincere, and shows a commitment to improvement. Just remember to finish with something marvelous, like your best work. Keep in mind that if you don't emphasize the tutorials then, at least as far as jobs and competitions go, they might as well not be there.

For your second question, following a tutorial like "balance your color scheme" with your own image is safe. Following a tutorial like "make a barcode" is questionable. Changing a work's design, however, would be a derivative work that could become plagiarism if you're not careful. I suggest getting the author's permission to be safe.

This is a basic introduction to graphic design. You won't be a pro designer after reading through this but you will be armed with a few simple things you can do to make anything you are working on look much better.

I won't go into detail on these topics. Instead I'll introduce them and give you enough information to put them into practice. It can be a good idea to do further research on these topics as there are many good pages out there that go into much more detail.

When most people think about good design they think about making something that looks amazing and mistakenly think they can achieve this with bells and whistles. This can actually work against you. Well designed and stylish items present material in a way that best suits how our subconscious takes in information and draws meaning from it. What you will find is that things which look stunning are normally very simple but in a way that makes it crisp and clear.

Whenever we look at anything (a web page, a photo, a plant, a person, a garden etc) our subconscious immediately starts trying to understand and draw meaning from what it can see. It wants to know what is important and what is less important and what is related to what and by how much. This happens largely without us even realising it and we have little control over it. Our subconscious will do this whether we like it or not.

Our minds have evolved to do this over many many thousands of years and is hard wired to do it in particular ways. For the vast majority of those years we have existed out in the real physical world and so our minds are best suited to interpreting physical things and environments. This is why it is often relaxing to sit in a garden or go on a bushwalk. The mind is surrounded by things it is naturally suited to understanding so it has to do little work and is thus happy.

The modern world is quite removed from this however. The presentation of material on paper and computer screens etc is very recent and quite different from what our minds are evolved to work with. The subconscious has to go to a lot more effort to interpret what it sees. We don't normally notice it but over time it will drain us.

The first thing we should think about with our material is colour. Most people tend to just throw colours in as needed and the end result ends up being disjointed. If you pick a limited and complementary colour scheme up front then stick with only those colours your content will be much more coherent.

Colour is an important aspect of our minds deriving meaning from what they see. We instinctively know that red means danger or warning for instance. Blues and greens make up our natural surroundings and are calming. Things that are closer to us are brighter and more vivid in colour but as they get further away those colours tend to fade. We should aim to translate these characteristics of colour in the real world into our own material.

A colour scheme is a set of colours that you select for your design. All aspects of the design should then use only these colours. The number of colours you will need will depend on your work and its complexity. Typically you would want a base set of colours, then a few that are richer or brighter in colour and a few that are lighter in colour (these could be variations of your base colours or complementary).

The Colour Wheel is a basic tool that designers use to create colour schemes. Two quite good ones are Kuler by Adobe and Color Scheme Designer. The basic idea is that the 3 primary colours (red, green and blue) are spaced out around a wheel and evenly transitioned between. You then pick your colour scheme by picking points evenly spaced around the wheel.

Like most of these things, with practice you will get better so don't be put off if your first few attempts at creating colour schemes aren't that good. It is not uncommon to spend 1/2 an hour or more experimenting and tweaking with different colour schemes before finding one that works. A good approach is to look at other work to find inspiration and get an idea of what general colour scheme you may want. Then go to the premade colour scheme sites mentioned above and pick a few you like. Then head over to the Colour Wheel tools and tweak and experiment further.

Once we have our colours sorted out, the next thing to consider is how our text will look. For most material, the text conveys the majority of the information. As such, easier to read text (legibility) can play a huge part in how your material is considered.

There are many different fonts out there and they can have a big impact on legibility. A general rule is that on the screen sans serif fonts are easier to read and printed serif fonts are easier to read. Feel free to mix and match however. A common combination is to use a sans serif font for the content and a serif font for headings. Keep your use of fonts limited too. Most designers like to work with only 2 fonts on a piece of work. They may touch 3 but only as a last resort.

Too small and your readers will find it hard to read. Too large and it just doesn't look right. Don't be afraid to try your text a little bit larger than normal. You may be surprised by how it turns out (this is both for headings and main body text).

If the lines are too close to each other then it makes the content cramped and your mind has to put more effort in to keep on the right line. If the lines are too far apart then if can have the affect of making your text seem disjointed. I find that the default leading is typically not bad but can be improved by making it slightly further apart.

As you're probably guessing, there's a pattern forming here. Again too close and it's hard to read and too far apart breaks the flow. Sometimes, headings being a good example, playing about with tracking can actually create some nice effects.

This will largely be affected by the overall design of your work but is something you should consider. The recommended number of words per line is between 9 - 15 but you can generally get away with a bit more than this if you get your other aspects (font, font size, leading and tracking) in balance. One think to keep in mind, if you're designing web pages particularly, is lines that adjust to the width of the screen. This is especially so nowadays with larger widescreen monitors being common. You want to make sure your lines don't become too long and unwieldly.

The following ideas relate to the ways that our minds naturally percieve information and the world around us. When things are designed to fit in with the way our minds work then they can absorb and understand what is being presented with much less effort. When we can do that we are happy and that is good design.

These are general observations about how our minds draw meaning from what our eyes see. Understanding them allows you to organise your material so that people can very easily understand it. It is quite a big area so I will cover some of the main points here but encourage you to do some further reading.

The mind is happy when it can easily make out simple regular shapes in what it is seeing. Although you don't need to restrict yourself to only using them, incorporating them into your overall design in subtle ways can add style.

Many people like to group things together using boxes. The problem is, the natural world around us doesn't tend to relate things by putting them in boxes. As such, it's not a natural way for our minds to see relationships. It takes a lot more effort for the mind to process boxes.

As we saw with Gestalt Theories above, our minds naturally seek to draw meaning from what they see. They want to know what is important and what is not, what is related and the order in which they should work through the information. Quiet structure seeks to prevent our minds doing this in areas where it is not needed. We achieve this by having even spacing around the different sections of our design.

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