Question for the designers

bump bump bump
no designers out thier?

think most in this business are self-learned

if self learned, what are some good website tutorials for building websites/designing using macromedia dreamweaver or photoshop?

Never took a design class...just taught myself ever since high school. But it wouldnt be a bad idea to take one if you wanna learn.

There's lots of little tutorials online that teach you how to use the different programs. Search around for some of them.

Not really. I did attend some photoshop and color psychology etc classes in college, but I did designs before those. I just learned as I went along, I got my first photoshop was bundled with my first pentium computer in 199-something and just started to mess around with it.

http://www.good-tutorials.com/ - Photoshop
http://www.sitebuilder.ws/dreamweaver/tutorials/ - Dreamweaver

I did though I learnt 95% myself. If you want some shortcuts (to software that is), try Lynda.coms courses in PSD, Flash etc.

thanks for the tips, imma check it out

nice links
im really interested in getting involved in designing these links should keep me busy for awhile

so if you were to do it over again without any prior experience with designing, would you take a course or just teach yourself over again?

Ive been submitting now for several months and want to be more involved in the buisness so any advice about designing would be a plus

by myself and im proud of it

Very hard to say. I can't imagine how it'd be to start now. Even as I started in mid 1990's, I still learn new stuff every day (almost). The amount of information available today, and the features photoshop has are a huge huge ordeal to learn from scratch (I'd imagine). It's almost like second nature to me already, so I really can't say where I'd personally start today, with 0 knowledge.

Depends a bit on what you want to learn. Pick up a few books about color psychology, not just for the advertising potential etc, but they usually have a lot of information on how colors match, explain the differences between rgb and cymk colors, luminosity etc etc. You kind of need to know a thing or 2 about colors if you want to design, you can know all the features of photoshop and still make designs that make ones eyes bleed if you're basically colorblind ;)

The second step would be to just play around with photoshop, do some tutorials etc. I doubt I'd ever enroll to photoshop classes if they weren't a part of my education. The bad thing about learning something like photoshop is that you won't learn it over night, you won't learn it in a week, not in a month... so, if I didn't know photoshop now, I doubt I'd have time to learn it. If you are already in college, and you have the opportunity to take classes on colors or/and photoshop, take them.

I don't think there's a better way to do things than just play around with it, you just have to make sure when following tutorials that you understand what and why something is done, if you just follow the instructions you don't know how to implement the stuff you just 'learned' to anything else.

hehe.. that was a long and pointless post
You're welcome

I would def recommend you taking just a small course in f.ex Photoshop. Some concepts you dont know about you just wont grasp entirely, or at least much to late, if you dont read a book, do courses etc.
I worked 2-3 years or so in PSD before I even started using layer masks and other functions - knowing those from the beginning, would have saved me alot of time.

Mail me at cchups (at) gmail.com and I can hook you up with some free video tutorials if you wish.

for someone that dosent know much about designing thiers tons of good info in this post, ill just keep fucking around with photoshop like i have been for the past couple weeks. i dont go to school, so i got lots of time to learn the basics. thanks again for your 'short story' of a post

yeah? ive looked up on some online courses they seem really helpful, but the advantages of working with a teacher and a students would seem like a tottal advantage, plus thiers always that drive to be/do better then the rest of the students which inturn makes you try that much harder . Ill for sure hit up your email for the tutorials

hey im not letting this post go away that quick;)