Illustrator is used in creating icons and there are lots of tutorials and books that you can use to learn how to work in this program, and here are a couple for you:
- “Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book” is a very tedious but useful book. And if you can get through at least half of it, you’ll be able to orient yourself quite confidently in the program.
- “Vector Basic Training” – a book with which you will learn how to create images with curves. By the way, the link provides videos and exercises in addition to the book.
Photoshop is considered to be more complicated than Illustrator, but the Internet is full of tutorials on this program:
- Tuts+ – here you will find a lot of tutorials (on Illustrator, too, by the way), which will help you to learn the tools and get skills in drawing.
- this channel contains a fairly large number of tutorials on Photoshop, and you will definitely need them.
The “Photoshop Tutorials” channel is a helpful resource that contains not only tutorials, but also different plugins, brushes, gradients, and much more. - You should study these tutorials at least for an hour a day, and you will quickly reach a fairly high level of knowledge of Photoshop. 3.
Decide on your specialty
Like any field, graphic design is divided into several narrow specialties: mobile apps, logos, and web design. Decide what you like best and put all your energy into learning your desired specialty.
Logo design:
- “Logo and Corporate Identity” – In this book, you’ll read about how to make a really cool and beautiful logo.
- Logo Design Love – a site from the author of the above-mentioned book. It’s also dedicated to logos, so it’s worth checking it out. It has inspiring examples and interesting information about logo design.
3 If you don’t want to stop at just creating a logo, the book “Designing Brand Identity” will help you learn how to build the entire brand structure – from the website to personal business cards.
Mobile App Design:
“Tapworthy” is a great and short book from Josh Clark, in which he talks about how to create an appealing looking, and most importantly, user-friendly app.
Go through the apps in your smartphone and try to figure out which ones are done well, which ones are not so well, and which ones are even out of whack. And pay attention to the little things that you don’t think have been thought through, figure out a way to fix the existing bugs.
Web design:
As with mobile app design, gather the sites you like and look at what’s done and how it’s done. Write out the main pluses of these sites and try to match your ideals in your future work.
Those who want to become a graphic designer often have the question of whether they need to know HTML and CSS. Let’s just say that knowing the basics of design you in no way hinder and even give an advantage. But everything, of course, depends on the specific job or project.