Web Design 9a – Graphic Design (Advanced)

When you’re a halfway decent web designer working in CSS and JavaScript, you can expand your skillset by learning how to work in other software and with various different techniques.  A good logo designer can make hundreds of pounds, and sometimes you will be called on to create a corporate identity – choosing the colours and designs for their printed material and advertising media.

This is when you should learn Vector Graphics, Desktop Publishing and Font Creation.

You should also learn as much as you can about good graphic design, what fonts to use, what makes a good logo etc.  You can buy books on this, but About.com and Wikipedia are excellent places to start for free.  Take a look at any tutorials that teach “grunge” style techniques or “web 2.0” design.  A range of sites you make designed to these styles will give your portfolio an edge.

Vector Graphics

The free software you’ll need for this is called Inkscape.  The benefit of vector graphics is that it shrinks to very small and can be increased to huge sizes with no loss of quality, unlike graphics created in GIMP (called raster, or bitmap graphics).  This is really useful for logos and icons that will need to be the same whether printed on a huge billboard or used as a tiny icon on a webpage.  The Inkscape software itself has some good beginner tutorials in it’s help menu, and the Inkscape website has a link to lots of tutorials which will make you better at it.  Then Google for some good vector graphic artwork and see if you can recreate it.  Deviant Art has loads of tutorials and excellent examples.  Remember, the more you do, the better at it you’ll be.

If you’ve already been working with paths and brushes in GIMP, you’ll understand a lot better how vector graphics work.

Desktop Publishing

If you need to create anything not on computer, you’ll need some good desktop publishing software.  Then you can make business cards, leaflets and booklets.  And charge more.  Again, the internet is full of great tutorials on page layouts, business cards and all aspects of DTP.  Just search!

You can get good DTP software for this for free.  It’s called Scribus.  It’s a huge and versatile piece of kit, and the website has beginner tutorials on making magazines and adverts.

Fonts

If you’re used to vector graphics and have used paths in GIMP, you can download software called FontForge and learn how to make your own typefaces.  If you’re making banners and headings for your clients, you can just make text in GIMP or Inkscape using the fonts you have, and stretch or squeeze them or add swirly bits to your heart’s content.  This is great if you have one-off jobs, but if you have some font making software under your fingers, you can then add these fonts to your favourite wordprocessor, or distribute them to others online.

About.com and Wikipedia have great articles on all these aspects of graphic design, and there are hundreds of blogs and websites by pro’s you can read that will give you an idea of current trends and techniques.

Also, if you have a sketchbook for regular doodling it will help you with clearing creative “blocks” and for experimenting with different colour combinations.

Look at some of the highest paid graphic designers/artists work and try and learn from them.  Try to develop your own design style and use it to great effect.  You’ll probably get work from people who love your style and want it in their own stuff.  Be as unique as you can, but show you’re versatile in any kind of design work.