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My advice is programmers who need graphics for their apps not for those planning to become designers. Hire a designer - but for their design skills, not their

by divtxt 16y ago

My advice is programmers who need graphics for their apps not for those planning to become designers. Hire a designer - but for their design skills, not their photoshop skills. You should (slowly) develop basic photoshop skills. This will let you go further before you hire a designer and also let you communicate with the designer much better. Steps: 1) Ask a designer friend to show you the very basics: layers, file format, resizing, colors, simple tools like text, bucket fill, etc. 2) Use a cheap Photoshop substitute - Paint.NET, Gimp or Pixelmator depending on your OS. 3) Learn by (i) watching a designer, (ii) reading online tutorials, (iii) trying simple stuff you need Over the years, I've gone from simple to more complex: - Crop & resize images and convert file formats. - Convert transparent PNG icons to transparent GIF. - Made very simple 16x16 transparent icons for web apps - by zooming in and toggling individual pixels! - Changing the colors in a designer's graphic to try out different color themes in a web app. - Simple text logos - watch a designer & you'll see a lot of this is about having a huge selection of fonts & picking a good font/color combination. - Business card design - some cards are just good text, colors and alignment - Basic fake miniature effect on some of my photos (following online tutorials) - Simple app icons (again, online tutorials) Edit: add opening paragraph

wladimir 16y ago
Good post. In addition to 2) For designing icons and illustrations, a vector drawing tool such as Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator) can be a great help. It's more flexible than bitmap oriented tools and you get perfect zooming to multiple sizes for free.
- divtxt 16y ago
  Excellent point. Guess this will depend on the work you need done. I did a lot of web apps and not much print or illustrations so I never bothered with vector tools. I did the business card in pixels - good enough for email proofs. Then a guy at the shop remade it in CorelDraw for actual print. For icons, I just use 512x512. :)

by divtxt 16y ago

wladimir 16y ago

Good post. In addition to 2) For designing icons and illustrations, a vector drawing tool such as Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator) can be a great help. It's more flexible than bitmap oriented tools and you get perfect zooming to multiple sizes for free.

divtxt 16y ago
Excellent point. Guess this will depend on the work you need done. I did a lot of web apps and not much print or illustrations so I never bothered with vector tools. I did the business card in pixels - good enough for email proofs. Then a guy at the shop remade it in CorelDraw for actual print. For icons, I just use 512x512. :)