PR 486: Intro to Digital Design Tools

Here is where you'll find slides and other fun stuff for our class!

Generally Important Stuff

• PR 486 Syllabus
• Instructions on getting an Adobe Creative Cloud account

Week 1

• Week 1 Slides - Design
• The Right Tool for the Job (Slides)

Inspiration / Good stuff to read:

• Improving Your Design Eye
• Before you can master design, you must first master the fundamentals
• Copying (is the way design works)
• A DIY Design Education
• How to Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better
• Fake Designs Yield Real Results
• Terrible logo design

Typography resources:

• Google Fonts
• Adobe Fonts
• DaFont, a classic source for free fonts
• Font Pair, a resource for pairing Google Fonts
• Fontjoy, another font pairing tool
• Font Memory Game
• Type Terms - a neat visual resource for learning about the finer points of typography and type terms
• Fonts Knowledge - a compendium of font guides from Google
• What the Font? - a tool to help you figure out what a font is if you see it in the wild
• Fontanello - a Chrome extension to help you identify web fonts
• Fuck Yeah Keming - a compendium of bad kerning
• CopyPalette - This is a tool for Figma/Sketch users, but you can always put in a base color and find lighter and darker shades of that color and copy the hex codes into your design program!
• The Step by Step Guide to Pairing Fonts - a neat little read on branding and choosing fonts

Color / color accessibility resources

• Color Theory For Designers -- With An Infographic
• Color Psychology for Social Impact - A primer on the psychology of color
• The Importance Of Color Accessibility In UX Design
• Adobe Color - Great for making color palettes!
• Happy Hues -- color in context
• Colorbook - A color palette generator based on work that's on the showcase site Dribbble
• Pika - a contrast checker app for MacOS (free)
• TPGI contrast checker tool (for both PC and Mac, free)
• Accesible Brand Colors - A great tool for looking at brand colors in context and getting suggestions if your contrast isn't enough
• Colorblindness simulator
• Another colorblindness simulator
• Colors.lol - Color palettes with a side of humor
• CopyPalette - for getting shades of a color

Design resources

• Free or (Almost) Free Design Tools
• The Stocks - compendium of all kinds of design goodies, from stock images/video to icons to design tools
• Shortcuts.design - Learn the keyboard shortcuts for a whole host of design programs out there
• Fun game to test your eye and determine whether something is truly centered
• @thechrisdo on Instagram - Fantastic design advice, business advice, marketing advice, and pretty design in the slides to boot

Week 2

• Slides: The Art of Logos
• Slides - Illustrator Basics
• Tip sheet - Important Illustrator Preferences

Inspiration / Good stuff to read:

• Which of these 5 types of logos is best for your identity project?
• Get started with logo design: 10-step guide
• 12 essential rules to follow when designing a logo
• Your logo is copied
• Nobody cares about your f**cking logo
• Clever wordplay and design
• Designer transforms Arabic words into illustrations of their literal meanings
• Illustrations of the literal meaning of idioms
• Dribbble - a good source of inspiration

Week 3

• Slides - Pathfinder / Clipping Path in Illustrator
• Dividing shapes in Illustrator
• How to install fonts on your computer

Tutorials and other helpful stuff:

• Illustrator Tutorials from Adobe
• Illustrator Cheat Sheet
• Shortcuts for Illustrator (searchable)
• Design a logo in Illustrator tutorial from Adobe

Icon resources:

• Auto Draw tool from Google
• The Noun Project, a place to find icons of things to draw or trace
• Iconstore - more free icons
• Google's Material Design Icons (open source)

Week 4

• Slides - File Packaging
• Slides - Text Manipulation and Effects in Illustrator
• Tip Sheet - The Stroke Panel in Illustrator (PDF)
• The Blend Tool in Illustrator (from Adobe help)

Week 6

• Slides - Poster Design

Week 8

• Slides - Photoshop Basics
• Images for in-class Photoshop work
• Photoshop Crop Tool Tipsheet

Photoshop basics resources:

• Photoshop Tutorials from Adobe
• Photoshop keyboard shortcuts
• Photoshop Cheat Sheet
• A cool tutorial on blending textures with photos
• Subtle Patterns
• Photoshop Textures
• Photoshop Etiquette
• More about Layer Blending Modes -- This is the dropdown that is next to opacity in the layers panel (Darken, Lighten, Multiply, etc.)

Week 9

• Tipsheet: Resizing your canvas in Illustrator and Photoshop
• Slides: The Art of Retouching
• Retouching class files
• Adobe tutorial on using the clone stamp
• Adobe tutorial on removing objects using the content-aware fill

Week 10

• Slides - Tracing in Illustrator
• Class files for tracing

Social Media resources:

• A guide to social media image sizes
• A guide to social media video specs
• Simple Design Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Images
• How to create a social media style guide for your brand
• Adobe Express -- a set of creation tools for social media posts, video and web
• Videezy -- great source for stock footage, background, or After Effects assets for any kind of video
• 8 ways to share links on Instagram
• A good read about how the Economist designs infographics for Instagram

Exporting tips:

• Cropping the circle avatar in Photoshop
• Exporting jpgs, pngs, and pdfs in Illustrator
• Exporting jpgs, pngs, and pdfs in Photoshop

Week 11

Mockup resources:

• GraphicsFuel mockup templates

Templates for vinyl / CD design / other final-related stuff:

• CD Jewel Case Templates
• Vinyl record templates
• Barcode and QR code generator

Week 12-13

InDesign resources:

• Slides - InDesign Basics
• Slides - Text Wraps
• Slides - Paragraph and Character Styles
• InDesign Tutorials from Adobe
• InDesign Keyboard Shortcuts
• How to create backgrounds for InDesign pages

Printing resources (for the real world)

• Slides - Printing
• JPGs, PNGs, TIFs, oh my! - a great read about file formats
• Glossary of paper and print weights (also a full glossary of terms if you scroll up)
• Comprehensive glossary of print terms
• Standard paper sizes (U.S.)
• International paper sizes
• Brochure Folding Guide
• Brochure Folding Guide - With Calculator
• Pantone color finder (for spot color)

Bonus Illustrator stuff

Illustrator pen tool / shape tutorial resources:

• A handy guide to the pen tool
• The Bezier Game -- pen tool practice
• The Boolean Game -- Great way to learn about combining simple shapes
• Pen tool exercise -- Illustrator file, click to download

• Slides - Repeat and Align
• Sample Illustrator Patterns
• Even More Illustrator Patterns
• Illustrator Brushes
• Another source of cool geometric patterns for Illustrator
• Instructions for loading patterns into your work
• Instructions for loading brushes into your work

3D resources:

• 3D in Illustrator