I have a blog where I write detailed articles and guides on Art & Design stuff (something like CreativeBloq).
Nowadays, I’m trying to incorporate a news section within the blog and would be hiring writers in the future to cover the latest happenings of the industry. However, since I’m currently going solo i wanted to ask you guys: where do you get your news from? Stuff like the latest graphic design AI tools, updates about Adobe, rebrands of a company, and some other stuff.
I know most of this info would be available on the subject’s official website (typically these websites have a ‘Press’ or ‘News’ section) but I’m not going to be sitting on their site clicking refresh and covering something as soon as it pops up.
So, what do you guys do? Do you subscribe to newsletters, follow some kind of channel, etc.? Let me know, I’d appreciate it, thanks
I gave up reading design/sign magazines years ago. Now I just quickflip through the online things to view the ads. Yep. Just the ads. Tells me what kind of new machinery is out there and what it does. Most of the stuff in the articles themselves I’ve been doing for 20 years or more, though everyone seems to write about it like they discovered it today.
If you’re living breathing this stuff on a daily basis you keep up through usage. Don’t really need blogs telling me what the latest greatest is. Creative Cloud on the desktop annoys me enough with the pings on “What’s New.”
Perhaps if you want scoops, you have to develop contacts at the companies you want info from. Sure they have Press pages. Do they have a Press Release list? Have you developed contacts at the industry trade associations? I don’t think much of them, but some like the SGIA (now Printing United Alliance) and SEGD are on top of a lot of the current softwares and industry developments as well as top designers and Green Awareness.
Huh. To each their own I guess. My main source of news comes from design magazines but I do agree that things have become a bit generic in the whole race for producing more content - thus leading to that unnecessary hype of acting like they discovered something new
I could defintely try to outreach to companies and that actually seems like a great idea however it’ll be difficult to scale and would just be poorly coordinated unless I’m around the clock in constant contact with them - I don’t have the time to nurture those relationships as I already have a lot of big plans with the blog that I have to give my time to.
It’s not as if you need to have any amazing story to tell, just a nifty idea or easier way or unusual way of getting a job done.
Yeah, I’ve been checking out their website and they have some great stuff, definitely share-worthy. I’m really into poster and flyer design so I could definitely grab some tips myself and even share them with my audience
A lot of videos online showcasing how tos are very basic and make a lot of basic errors that are seemingly ignored in favour of showcasing a feature.
That’s true but at the same time I guess most creators purposefully don’t go into detail of showing the ‘correct way’ of doing something mostly because beginners don’t really care in the start. Most beginners tend to overlook the right way of doing something because in their mind they want to get something done - it doesn’t matter if it’s the proper way of doing it or not - it’s only later on in their careers when they’re a bit more serious that they start looking into the finer details
The most common example is in text formatting. You’ll see so many beginner tutorials showing you the most incorrect ways of formatting text but since it ‘gets the job done’ they don’t mind.
The creators of content have a responsibility and are just as bad as the ‘mac monkeys’ or ‘prepress jockeys’ before them or took after them.
On top of that there’s just so many content creators that just don’t have a clue either, and are just making videos of bad tutorials for likes shares and money.
Truth of the matter is if you went into the nuances of how to do it correctly the video would be 9 hours long and nobody would watch it.
And it’s pretty much the reason why it ends up costing the client more money down the road.
And also promotes bottom of the barrel graphic designers going in the cheapest rates and giving design a bad name - and lowering the value across the board in professionalism and in cost.
The knock on effect from really bad tutorials is felt from the ground up to the moon and back.
But content is so readily available - it’s like trying to stop a flood with a pebble.
But this happened well before the internet, grease monkeys, prepress monkeys, monkeys everywhere.
It just spreads quicker with the internet.
At least when I started out it was a learned skill, requiring knowledge of math, chemicals, processes, etc. Now anyone can throw their hat in the ring if they feel like being a designer you can be one.
Hey I was proud of my Prepress Monkey status on the AIGA boards way back when. Tried to tell a few designers the right way to do something and got dismissed with that monicker (I almost used it as a screen name here,LOL!) Got no use for those “pay yer money, yer a dezina types.”
Yah, some of those tutorials with egregious errors on Adobe got a Feedback from me, what little good that does. The attitude of teaching beginners schlock so they can ‘get it done’ pretty much sums up the entire educational aspect of Graphic Design right now. My absolute favorite though is white blocks in logos covering up what they don’t want people to see. It’s hard to believe I’m still seeing that. But [shrug] that’s what the “Set Up Charge” is for.
Hiding items in layers, in Illustrtator. I hit the shortcut one day to unhide all - and about 10,000 things popped up all over the file… I was like what effing eff is going on here?
Turns out - insteadof deleting - just hide things. File was enormous.
