Learning graphic design from home?

[Mikey77]

Hi ladies and gentlemen, I am just getting into web design by way of a Dreamweaver course at a local evening school, and have been advised that Graphic Design is really a necessity if you want to have good skills as a web designer these days.

The issue with me is that although there are a few multimedia courses in London, I do not wish to do anything like full time study. The Dreamweaver course is only 3 hours a week, but some of the multimedia / Graphic courses seem to be 18+ hours a week.

Now my question is whether I might be making a big mistake, and wasting a very good opportunity in thinking it would be possible to learn graphic design from home as opposed to a course? The courses do sound like they are comprehensive.

I would ideally be able to get an introductory book and learn that way, while looking to build a portfolio of sites and graphics in the long term, but, in my ignorance, I do not know if this is feasible.

I'd appreciate any advice, and to hear from anyone who has learnt from home as opposed to learning on a course.

[Frendie]

My opinion is... it is a waste of $ to take courses. You can learn them by your own easily, there are alot of resouces over the Internet, and you can ask if you don't understand, any of your friends or in forum.

Indeed, I never pay $ to learn graphic design and Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is kinda user friendly, you will get used to it very easily.

Anyway, good luck !!!

[Riya]

There are things that you learn in the classroom that you won't learn anywhere else. There are things that you will learn by teaching yourself that you won't learn anywhere else. So it all comes down to what works best for you. My education has been a mixture of both. If you want to teach yourself, go for it. I would suggest getting some books on Design Theory. Also, talk to people, designers and printers that live near you and hang out here, ask questions, learn.

[budafist]

It depends on what kind of a person you are and if home is a sanctury or a madhouse!

I think courses are great and I would do more if I had time. Personally I do pick up stuff myself, but I wouldn't want to learn something from scratch just by myself. You learn from mistakes and learning a programme from all your mistakes is a whole lot of mistakes. I think a short course is a great way to start. Then from then on if you are teach yourself at least you know the basics.

[liuhuan]

My advice is to buy some DVDs which teaches you directly by operation on screen .:)

[hellyea]

My opinion is... it is a waste of $ to take courses. You can learn them by your own easily, there are alot of resouces over the Internet, and you can ask if you don't understand, any of your friends or in forum.

Indeed, I never pay $ to learn graphic design and Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is kinda user friendly, you will get used to it very easily.

Anyway, good luck !!!

I seriously agree with you, that courses are a waste of $ and time. And also there are tons of resourses we can find over the internet. But here is my question: You teach yourself, and you are good at it. But you don't have a degree, so...?

Basically, what I'm doing now is teaching myself at home, and going to college, planning to major in Graphic Design, it's only my freshmen year now, so it's not too late to drop out of school, if it's needed.

[Mikey77]

Well, it seems it is a matter of preference then. My home is a bit of a madhouse, but at the moment anything is preferable to me rather than studying full time.

The thing that concerns me is if I do go the route of trying to buy books off Amazon and learn, will they be structured enough? Also, will I have a problem finding the right books and will I end up in a muddle learning stuff that I don't really need for web-graphic design? That's where the lack of structure might be a problem at home.

Anyway, this is a good forum so I'll do a search on here and see what books are recommended.

I'd still like to hear from anyone who might have done it all from home and has some good / bad stories to tell.

[Drazan]

You can learn quite a bit from home. Between online tutorials and resource books there's enough information to keep you busy learning for quite some time.

However, I don't know what it is like in the UK, but in the states it is sometimes very hard to be accepted when the next person in line for an interview has a degree and you don't. (There is a long story why I don't have a degree, but I won't bore you.)

I've been told at least a half dozen times in the last ten years that "the choice is between you and another person and that person has the degree". So I did freelance on my own and started my own company for it. Finally after quite a bit of struggle I'm working for a good design firm that has national accounts.

So what is your target? Are you looking for a little freelance, or getting into this as a profession?

[budafist]

Firstly, I'm NOT trying to scare you but...

I have a degree and it still took me 8 months to find a job. Recruitment agencies wouldn't even interview unless there was 2 years on the job experience on top of a qualification (the best design recruitment agencies preferred 5 years work experience). That was INCLUDING junior positions in studios. Those 8 months were TOUGH. While I did have a part time job during this time I had to take unpaid time off to interview etc. Lucky my then employers knew that I wasn't serious about that fill in job and let me take afternoons or mornings off to interview.

While a portfolio is important, that alone my not get you the interviews you need for a full time job. However it should be enough for freelancers.

Talk to local design recruitment agencies. It's a bit crazy here since we have around 6 graphic design courses in my city and each one is graduating 100 new students a year. 600 brand new graphic designers looking for a job every year is daunting!

[Mikey77]

I was searching the archives of this forum before I registered and there seem to be many people who believe a portfolio is far more important than a degree.

[budafist]

That's great, just make sure your portfolio is better than any student's portfolio!

[chris_bcn]

Definately agree that your portfolio is far more important.

I would look at your work, and your previous experience before hiring someone. The degree tells me you're able to work to deadlines in some way, and that you have training, but if it's a web job, I'd be worried that you've been taught a program (Dreamweaver for example) not the underlying code, or that you knew nothing about modern web techniques

[Mikey77]

I'm aware that people need to learn more than Dreamweaver, but I wonder how many people actually learn HTML just by designing sites with purely HTML??

I intend to learn as much as I can in addition to Dreamweaver. But I know I'm along way off and I don't imagine you can call yourself a web designer or graphic designer because you have learned a couple of software applications.

[hellyea]

I'm aware that people need to learn more than Dreamweaver, but I wonder how many people actually learn HTML just by designing sites with purely HTML??

I intend to learn as much as I can in addition to Dreamweaver. But I know I'm along way off and I don't imagine you can call yourself a web designer or graphic designer because you have learned a couple of software applications.

I don't know what to say because I'm just a starter. But from what I know, Dreamweaver and HTML are not very important. A lot of new webdesigners nowadays mainly focus on their photoshop skills, flash definately, and in addition, it'd be nice to know some illustration using vector or some 3d modeling. I mean, you just need to be extremely good at "something", and then people will buy you.

But if you go for something in programming such as PHP, JS, CSS, that would be a web programmer. I myself, find that a little boring. But yeah. Good luck.

[Drazan]

All webpages have some basis of HTML. The basics are not hard to learn at all.

I do hand coding whenever possible. It creates cleaner code, better backwards compatibility and better for Assisted browsers (ie. visually challenged, or blind).

I've had people who had someone use Dreamweaver (or FrontPage, or whatever program) come to me to "fix it" or to optimize it because it was slow or "I can't even search for my name and have it come up", than I do startup webpages.

Learn the nuts and bolts of HTML and CSS and how to put a page together. Then when something does break you can figure out if the program you were using left out an end tag or some other stupid omission.

I built the original G1 skinning system out of html and CSS. So anyone can dynamically change the entire look of Gallery with one Skin file. In the second version of the skinning system, for 1.5, I used Divs and a little PHP to enable the captions to be moved from bottom to right or to left with one Skin file. Simple code, yes. (Though it did take about 6 months to recode G1.5 skinning system with the help of Jens for extracting php functions that wouldn't break other code. ;) )

Then start learning the basics of Javascript like onmouseover, dynamic HTML menus (drop down, slide out) or even time stamp clocks. These are easy enough to find, figure out, and use to dress up a site. Like the rollovers that change the image in the middle of the page...javascript.

Then start learning PHP. More and more sites are using PHP to assist coding, and to write scripts, manipulate databases, etc. There's many degrees of using PHP, my main use is to build a site template so if I want to add one page I can change one menu file and the other 600 or so pages are all updated automatically. Nearly all popular CMS, Forums, Newsletters, Ecommerce programs use PHP.

If someone came to you and said I want it to look different, you would be hard challenged to even start if you didn't know at least HTML and CSS.

I've seen way to many sites lately that use a single image for a whole page with image mapping. Even the text is an image. Same with flash. Unless you are really good most flash sites can be slow and content is all inclusive in the program. I won't even get into what search engines think of those.

Visual appealing is great, using programs to asisst you is fine, but without the coding skills to back it up, it is just another pretty picture on the web. Sorry, if that seems harsh to some, but that is my opinion and I've been doing this for 14 years.

=)
Jo