Whether you're a graphic designer or a wannabe just starting out life with Photoshop or other image editors, you'll surely need a helping hand. One of the easiest ways to get started with image design is to follow online guides and graphic design tutorials.
Due to the vastness of the Internet, there are literally hundreds and thousands of graphic design tutorial sites for building design skills. Some better than others but which is the best? Save your time -- don't bother searching.
I've selected five sites in which the tutorials are easy to follow and provide both basic and advance skills for novices like myself.
Ideabook.com
Ideabook is one of the most long standing and recognized design idea resource sites. It's produced by Chuck Green, who has written numerous desktop publishing books and other resources, most notably the Before&After Page Design book that provides very accessible ideas for designing newsletters, ads, brochures, fliers, stationery and more.
His site provides over three dozen free graphic design tutorials on topics, including logo design, using grids, readable pages, typography, using clip art, and finding the right commercial printer. A few interesting tutorials includes, Sell your site with a "˜Webcard, Logo ideas: A transparency project, Step-by-step logo design and Grids: an invisible foundation.
CreativePro
I've been subscribing to Creativepro.com for a few years now, mainly because it offers a variety of tutorials and reviews on a wide of variety of creative content ideas. While this site is not exclusively focused on graphic design, its how-to section is chock-full of tutorials on topics and skills including, Drawing Paths with Photoshop"˜s Pen Tool (a required skill for any designer), bold vs. italic typeface, or one for simply designing a custom Twitter Background. You can sort the site's how-to topics by "print and design" to make it easier to find specific articles.
The Graphic Reporter
Author Lesa Snider's The Graphic Reporter doesn't have lots of tutorials, but she has three very useful ones for novice designers, including Picking the Perfect Palette: How to choose colors that go together, Basic Design principles for the design challenged, and Let Your Graphics Do the Talking. Snider has written a Missing Manual tome for Photoshop CS4, and she's a regular contributor to Layer's Magazine.
About.com: Desktop Publishing
I'm a little hesitant about recommending About.com because I find the ads and layout of the site somewhat obtrusive, but its Desktop Publishing section provides hundreds of step-by-step tutorials on topics including choosing fonts and artwork, working with images, designing for Web and On-Screen, working with text, etc. Many of the graphic design tutorials are not well illustrated, but if you can follow step-by-step instructions, it's a useful resource site.
A few examples include: "Five Ways to use Dingbat Fonts", "Creating an Embedded Clipping Path," and understanding Kerning and Tracking.
Psdtuts+
One of the most prolific free tutorial sites is Psdtuts+. Its design tutorials will blow you away, but I would say they are largely for intermediate and advance graphic design application users. That is, if you have experience using Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign; you will find the well illustrated tutorials highly accessible.
A few recent tutorials that stand out for me include, "How to Design a Print-Ready Flier with Photoshop and Illustrator", "Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons", and "Dirty Design: Creating a Grungy Thriller Book Cover".
All the sites tutorials are produced by professional designers and they typically the resource files used in the tutorials.
So what graphic design tutorial sites do you recommend? What do you look for in a useful tutorial?
Image credit: //endless∞