Designing - Is Photoshop the best and most useful to learn?

Hi Marcus,

They have a Photoshops basic course here on Treehouse: http://teamtreehouse.com/library/photoshop-foundations.

Also, lynda.com isn't free, but they have a lot of great design tutorials.

Photoshop is a great tool. I would also recommend learning Illustrator or another vector program. You can create vectors in Photoshop, but the features offered by a dedicated vector program such as Illustrator are very handy. There is also an Illustrator basics course on here too. I have been working with these programs for a long time, so I zoomed through the courses on here by taking the quizzes (I wanted to finish the Web design track), but from the questions asked I get the sense they will point you in the right direction.

There are open source alternatives to these programs too. For example, Gimp is a nice open source alternative to Photoshop. It won't be much better when it comes to learning curve, but it's free. The advantages to Photoshop and Illustrator are that Adobe sort of owns the market with these design programs, which means sharing files with colleagues is much easier and more likely to work.

The basics of Photoshop are simpler than they look. If you've learned HTML and CSS, you won't have much trouble with something like Photoshop.

If you have other questions, let me know. I'm happy to chime in on design software.

Best,

Wade

Thanks Wade

To be honest I completely overlooked the courses here, I'll get started on them right away.

I'll also look into lynda.com too, what I'm looking for is tips and tricks on how to create nice UI elements or something that'll teach me the technical know how so I can see something and have a basic understanding of how they created it. I guess that kind of aptitude will be a fairly long learning process but I'm willing to make the effort.

No problem. Happy to help. When you say tutorials about creating UI elements, do you have something specific in mind? If you point me to a site and some UI elements that you like, I'm happy to break down what I can for you. If it helps, I can give you the basics about how something like what you're looking at might have been created.

Also, there are a lot of ways to do any one thing, so be prepared to see a lot of techniques to accomplish the same effect. With experience you will start picking the right process for you workflow and projects. Each design challenge let's me learn something new. It's always about picking the right tool and technique for the job rather than using a technique or tool because it's what you already know.

Hey Marcus,

I don't have time to teach you techniques either :). I just mean if you are having trouble wrapping your head around how something might have been done I can lend you some info. Lynda is where I learned a lot of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and other programs years ago. It's not a great place, at this point, to learn code, but it excels when it comes to teaching design and visual communications software.

Good luck going forward.

ok lol, my bad.

I think I was asking too much to learn everything here, it's very good for coding but hasn't got much in way of design so it looks like I'll go elsewhere for that (most likely lynda.com).

Also, I don't mean to put down the design courses here. I think there is some good design teaching here, and I can't really speak for the Photoshop and Illustrator courses. It's always good to learn from a variety of sources. You'll learn something at each. If you're already paying for Treehouse I would start here.

There is a better alternative to Photoshop. Look up Paint.NET. Its a free alternative to Photoshop, and has the exact same functionality. I used Photoshop before and it was good but this was better. Its actually the much better choice for any poor designer since its open sourced and has a community. I would recommend everyone on treehouse to switch.