Vendor agnostic Vector and Raster Editors Courses

Charlie, you should buy Sketch 3. It is absolutely great. I love it. As I said, the Pixelmator + Sketch team is perfect for web design work and costs about $ 100. Totally worth it.

Thanks Hugo. I have the Sketch 3 trial on my computer now and I was just following on the Mobile Game Design course which uses Illustrator at points. It might be that I just haven't found my way around Sketch yet but nearly all of the features they used in Illustrator weren't in it. I admire simplicity but it seems a bit too stripped back if I'm honest.

I've just had a look at Pixelmator which looks great but I also noticed a relatively new app on the App store (UK) called Affinity Designer which has some amazing reviews so far (65 - 5*; 2 - 4*) with some saying it replaced Illustrator and 'blew Sketch and Pixelmator out of the water'. The interface and feature lists looks very impressive, and it's even cheaper than Sketch 3 at £28 (introductory promotion - £35 normally) https://affinity.serif.com

Do you have any experience with Affinity, or would you care to give your opinion?

I have seen the Affinity banner in the App Store, but I'm just getting good at Sketch. You can try the Mobile App Design for iOS here in Treehouse with Sarah Parmenter. She uses Sketch to develop the app interface. It is a great course by itself and it is perfect if you want to use Sketch for UI design.

I'll try Affinity Designer later but I think I'll wait it gain some traction to see what the fuss is about.

Ahh great, that course was one of the next ones on my list so hopefully I can get a grounding in Sketch from that. Thanks for your help

Reasonable points, James. My only response is that may not apply in all cases. It doesn't in mine, for example, as I took on the track for the technical side and general concepts. But, I'd add that learning how to create something professional in photoshop or illustrator is not the same as creating a professional AND original piece of art. Take the spaceman example in the video. I can reproduce Mat Helme's artwork quite adequately. I can even copy the techniques, but I can't produce something similar on my own. I don't have that talent--wish I did. Mat's better with color than I am, and he's more creative and has more talent (and possibly training in graphic design).

Talented people often fail to appreciate their own talent, and tend to generalize the talent to others without justification "if they just work hard enough at it". Some of you creative folks should appreciate your talent. You have a gift I simply don't have regardless of the tools provided. It's actually a pretty interesting cognitive process sitting down to create something after an "inspiring" stimulus like the videos provide only to realize while you know how to go about producing something in the software, you have no idea what to produce or even how to get the result creatively. You don't even really know what it should look like. Everyone can sing, but what is the actual range of singing talent? I've heard some atrocious singing, I sing adequately, and of course we've all heard truly great artists. Will giving bad singers lessons in music production software make them into good or even adequate singers?

So, I guess the question for the track is should someone be able to focus on the technical side of web design and maybe creating at the concept level without being force fed something they're literally incapable of reproducing?

So, I guess the question for the track is should someone be able to focus on the technical side of web design and maybe creating at the concept level without being force fed something they're literally incapable of reproducing?

The term web design has undergone a bit of a transition in the past decade. Some positions call for the creation of image assets than others.

You should play to your strengths, apart from logo / icon creation there is a lot you can do. There is advanced CSS skills, JavaScript, User Experience Design work, traditional design fundamentals combine them together to be the best maker of web pages that you can be.

I think there is a good argument for and an equally good argument against having an Illustrator course in a web design track.

One thing to consider is what differentiates the Web Design track from Frontend Development track apart from its creation of artistic assets.

I don't see why we can't have the best of both ideas and just have illustrator/photoshop be available as additional resources--along with other things that could be useful. If I had more artistic talent, I'd have loved those badges. My problem is not being able to opt out of something that didn't move me toward my goal. It's not the end of the world that I had to take them, but they're the longest badges in the track. I felt like it took me forever to complete them, and it was only delaying my education. By the way, contrast the many 15-20 minutes videos with the 1-3 minute videos in the logo badges. It's a really dense presentation--awesome for people who are talented designers.

Finally, Adobe products are so overly expensive. That alone leads me to open source.

I just want to stress I'm not critical of the treehouse product. My aim is not to tear down, but to provide some positive feedback that might help in overall product delivery. I actually think treehouse is a great resource, and the photoshop/ illustrator badges are very much worth the time of anyone good enough to use them. I even like the software, though I've never liked any of Adobe's price points. Open forums often get SO negative, positive messages are overwhelmed. So, I just wanted to keep my comments on track. Luckily, this thread hasn't turned into a bash thread yet. :)