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Do you read design tutorials? You should.
Posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 under design inspiration, design resources by Dustin Brewer.It is an interesting topic, most of us consider ourselves the masters of our field or talented enough to be able to figure everything out on our own. this just isn’t the case for any of us. We have to be sure to infuse our lives with a little modesty otherwise we risk becoming pompous and stuck in creative ruts.
It is important to understand how other people are doing things, if you can take some time out of your day to possibly even watch someone else work in Photoshop or in CSS you may find that you learn something completely new by just watching someone else work.
Design tutorials can teach us something new
If we just follow a tutorial every now and again we can find new ways to do things or possibly a new design element that we can add to our vast portfolio of design characteristics of a web or print design. It is always extremely important to improve our knowledge on the subject of design as much as possible.
There are a lot of web sites available for design tutorials and inspirational elements to add within our design. For example, you can jump over to Bitt box and get some good tutorials and he always has some nice brushes or high-res images that you can incorporate into your designs.
There are also sites like tutorialized that are based on a digg-like idea that the more interest in a tutorial the more popular it will be on the site. Going through the sites listed on tutorialized you can find a lot of interesting things to do or try.
It doesn’t matter whether you are using Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver or Flash there is a tutorial on tutorialized for you. The site is categorized based on software and based on language. So if you want tutorials with CSS, XML, AJAX, Adobe Flex or any language or design pattern you can easily find it on this site.
Of course, I have tutorials here on this site every now and again. However, with the user generated content available on tutorialized it far outweighs me in sheer volume of direction.
Tutorials are great for creative inspiration
Going through a design tutorial isn’t just going to help you learn how to do something new but it is also going to help you get inspired in an entirely new way. It is easy to get inspired through a tutorial, not even necessarily involving the idea behind the actual tutorial but setting out on the task can lead you to all kinds of different inspiration.
For the most part these things are free and extremely easy to find with a simple Google search. So for some good inspiration and a little change in pace. Take an inspirational break and do some tutorials. Learn new ways to do things and inspire yourself to new levels of creativity.
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4 Responses to “Do you read design tutorials? You should.”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Thanks for catching that Don, I guess I wasn\’t paying attention.
bittbox has two t’s…with one t it links to a parked domain…
I’ve always seen tutorials as things that people use when they don’t know what they are doing. I never really thought about using it as a tool for inspiration.
I think I am going to start doing a tutorial a week or so to keep myself inspired and give me new design ideas. Great post!
[...] I have always recommended that even if you feel you have mastered web design to do at least one design tutorial a week for inspiration. I find them to be very helpful for discovering news ways to do things in your design [...]