Learning the basic computer application skills for creative professionals
This website contains a full set of tutorials to teach a basic graphic design technical skillset for creative professionals. Much of the material here is based on the applications of the Adobe Creative Suite — because InDesign is the defacto global standard application for desktop publishing.
These lessons pre-suppose that you have a subscription to the Adobe Creative Suite and that you have the up-to-date English versions of the following software installed on your computer.
- Photoshop, for image-editing — pixels
- Illustrator, for creating and editing shapes — vectors
- InDesign, for desktop publishing — layout
- Bridge, for viewing and organising resources (directories and files)
- Acrobat DC, for creating and manipulating PDFs
You furthermore need to have Adobe Creative Cloud installed in your menu bar.
In addition to learning how to use the above applications, this course material covers very brief introductions to
- computing basics for professionals
- photography and photographic principles
- typography
- layout and good practice
- the rendering of colour.
Context
These lessons came about through teaching “Graphic Design Skills” at an école supérieure (in France a kind of university) to first and second-year students in their five-year master’s programme in International Market Communications. Second-year students also do considerable project work, which is not shown here.
Note that graphic design skills is not the same as graphic design. Here we are learning the technology or application toolset for creative professionals and not how to be a graphic designer per se.