Become a Professional Graphic Designer

Explore five universal principles of visual design: organization of information, alignment of objects, rhythm, contrast, and whitespace to create visually pleasing layouts for graphic design.

Learn to organize information in layouts by grouping related content, creating visual order, and guiding the viewer's eye from what it is to when, where, and how much it costs.

Explore how alignment uses left, right, and center alignments and strong guiding lines to bring order to content, avoid chaos, and guide the viewer.

Cultivate visual interest and guide layouts with contrast—dark vs light, large vs small text, and bold vs plain elements to highlight the most important information.

Identify the design’s message and purpose, define the target audience and desired emotions, then choose fonts, colors, and visuals that support the communication.

Explore serif, sans serif, script, and decorative typeface styles with practical examples like Times New Roman, Georgia, and Century Gothic, and learn about font resources and licensing.

Learn to establish a concise typeface hierarchy by selecting a small set of fonts that reflect the design message, then build harmonious font combinations for headings and body text.

Explore how color communicates mood and guides viewer perception, using red, yellow, blue, and their mixes to build a cohesive palette that reinforces your design message.

Explore color spaces by examining rgb and cmyk, understand additive versus subtractive models, and see how these spaces guide on screen design and print workflows.

Explore imagery that reinforces your design message by sourcing photography, textures, and icons from free, commercially usable resources with clear licensing and copyright considerations.

Explore the difference between raster graphics, which use pixels, and vector graphics built from mathematical shapes. Raster is resolution dependent and loses quality when scaled; vector remains scalable.

Discover how hypertext markup language (HTML) provides page structure and cascading style sheets (CSS) handles styling, and why hand coding by hand isn’t rocket science for designers.

Compare getting a graphic design job versus freelancing, and learn to differentiate through specialization (logo, branding, mobile, interface design), basic coding, and end-to-end project management to land work.

Explore dribble dot com, pttrns dot com, and site inspirer dot com to keep your creative batteries charged and spark ideas for web design gallery, business cards, and brochures.

Explore how to become a professional graphic designer by mastering alignment, white space, rhythm, typography, color, imagery sourcing, and tools like raster and vector editors, and building a portfolio.

Explore the difference between raster and vector graphics, learning how raster uses pixels and is resolution dependent, while vector relies on math and scales without quality loss.

Explore common raster graphic file formats in photoshop, including psd, jpeg, gif, png, and tiff, and learn how each preserves layers, color, transparency, and sharing potential.

Master creating new documents in Photoshop with customizable dimensions, units, resolution, color modes, and presets; learn to manage documents as tabs or floating windows and use keyboard shortcuts.

Learn to revert to the last saved version, then use free transform to resize, move, rotate, and center an image in a new web document using pixels.

Master the fundamentals of selections in Photoshop, using the rectangular marquee tool to create precise areas, refine with marching ants, zoom with spacebar, and constrain shapes with shift and alt.

Practice elliptical selections by mastering circular and oval tools, watch the marching ants, and adjust with the space bar and shift to create centered selections for copy, paste, or filters.

Learn to transform selections in Photoshop using the Transform Selection tool to refine rough outlines, rotate, resize, and align odd shapes like washers, rectangles, and circles for precise results.

Learn to work with floating selections: move and layer selected content, duplicate selections with alt/option drag, and understand how de-selecting edits pixels and places content on the image.

Learn to create color-based selections with the quick selection tool in Photoshop, painting selections, adjusting brush size, and adding multiple objects for copy and paste to another document.

Learn to combine Photoshop selection tools with the free transform command to rotate, scale, and move a floating selection (marching ants), preparing for layers.