Design, understood as a widespread cultural phenomenon, is sweeping the world. Every element of our lives is becoming designed: Our websites, workspaces, clothing, personal identity, even our vacation plans and the routes we take to get to our destinations. This isn’t a bad thing, it simply is.

Due to this phenomenon, the world’s thirst for designers and those designers’ ability to create meaningful environments, experiences and brands is seemingly unquenchable. This has created an influx of new talent, from high schoolers designing their friends’ Myspace pages to waiting lists for graphic design, fashion and architecture programs at universities. Now that everyone is a designer in some fashion, professionals often lament the amount of bad design floating around, especially on the internet. Indeed, there are petabytes of bad design beaming around the world, but there is also a lot of talent, much of it undiscovered.

For several years I have taught design in an informal fashion, whether through email correspondence or sit-down lessons. You can tap my skills and knowledge to take great leaps forward in the creation of up-to-date, interesting and visually compelling design, whether you’ve never touched a design program before or you are a professional in the field looking to expand and refresh your skill set. Not sure? Just click here and let’s talk about it.

Design Lesson Categories

Graphic Design College Preparation: For those who are in a graphic or web design program or are getting ready to begin one. These lessons will give you a great advantage in the classroom, as you can spend your time learning theory and application, rather than trying to figure out how to use InDesign or what typographic approaches succeed and fail.
Design for  Hobbyists: Maybe you are young or working in a different industry. You aren’t planning to jump into a design career, but you like playing with Photoshop and you want to be better at it.
Design for Professionals: If you work in marketing or design and want a quick, personal way to improve or modernize your skillset, this is for you. Or maybe you are in the information technology field, and were recently told your duties now include maintaining the company website. In that case, we can get you up to date on modifying CSS, XHTML, Javascript and Flash without having to take a semester long course or bumble through code self-help books.
Design for Scrapbooking: Besides being a fun pass-time, scrapbooking creates an end-product that can be highly valued and prized by succeeding generations. In a way, scrapbooking is like a little sister to professional graphic design: it is creating an “about us” type product, but for people and families, rather than businesses. I can show you how to use composition and typography as a means of improving your pages. Additionally, we will do a basic (to in-depth) study of Photoshop and how it can be used in your scrapbooks.

Areas of Study

Typography: Typography is the basis of good design. In these lessons, we will study typefaces and fonts, their strengths and weaknesses, and how best to use them. This also includes basic page composition and information heirarchy (information heirarchy determines which elements are most important, and how to design them accordingly).
Photoshop: Analysis of the workspace and toolbars; Editing and retouching images; Using layers; Sizing, scaling, resolution and image quality; Exporting images for print and web; Advanced design practices; and Photoshop for web design.