how does treehouse make its cartoon graphics

You dont need to be a great artist to do it. However you need to sketch first with pen and paper. If you cant imagine your design first it would be really hard to execute it. You need illustrator for creating an icon or artwork like those ones. You can do it with photoshop too but for the future if you need to print the same thing it can be hard to increase the size so creating vector icons are always beneficial.

Hi Ian,

I love the graphics on Treehouse too, so I did some digging and found this thread:

https://teamtreehouse.com/forum/graphic-design

Hope this helps!

One more thing if you're interested in learning how to do cartoon-like graphics. I recently found a bunch of YouTube videos by an illustrator named Bob Ostrom. He teaches illustration and has a few DVDs out. He used to do design work for Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon, etc. and he's also a children's book illustrator. Here is the link to his YouTube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/JerrysArtarama/search?query=bob+ostrom

Here's a link to a review of one of his children's picture books -- it gives a few examples of the illustrations inside one of the books he worked on called "Where Are the Dinos?":

http://www.firsttimemomanddad.com/2013/05/wherearethedinos.html

His DVDs are available here:

http://search.jerrysartarama.com/search?keywords=bob+ostrom

and this is his website:

http://bobteachesart.com/

If you Google "Bob Ostrom" you should find some more info. I love his style -- kind of reminds me of the old Hanna-Barbera stuff.

I'm thinking that they use After Effect or something similar for the animations and Illustrator for the graphic elements