You’re just beginning in the graphic design field and are just learning the ins and outs of layers, kerning, and page layout. You want to know more. What is the best border for your project, the best color palette? What should be kept in the design, and what needs to be cropped?
Fortunately, these online resources are here to help you from the beginning stages of design all the way on up to the finished project.
- Find a great tutorial to get you started. Try psd.tutsplus.com.
- Grab some stock photos to add zing to your page. Sxu.hu provides stock photos free of charge.
- Get some great icons at iconfinder.com; free fonts at dafont.com.
- Color lovers will love this site! Share and be inspired by graphic design enthusiasts and other color lovers at colourlovers.com.
- Get Flash and CSS website ideas at Showcasepoint.com. See reviews. Rate. Or try CSS Mania or CSS Remix.
- Use good tools that are known to give you good results and are loaded with useful featuers. A good tool is GIMP that is a free raster graphics editor and can be used as an image editing and retouching tool. Another good tool is Blender which can be used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rendering, skinning etc.
- Try some web design sites such as bestwebgallery.com or Noupe.com.
- How about an online magazine for starters? Smashing Magazine is a hit with graphic designers of all ages and persuasions. Learn how to use video in web design, find out what’s new in the graphic book department, and get some freebies and some info on designer toolkits. It’s all here!
- Video and motion information can be found at divx.com.
- Join a graphic design forum. Find out what others are doing, make a friend and find a future business partner.
- Try some expert graphic designer sites where designers showcase their work. Find out from the horse’s mouth what works and what doesn’t in graphic design. You will be glad you did.
- Always keep your previous work safe and organized so that you could take reference from it. The best idea to save previous work is to zip your files using some good file compress tool like 7-zip and to keep them in CDs or some online backup server date wise.
In the long run, being a great graphic designer takes more than finding these resources and putting into practice what you’ve learned. You must keep learning and perfecting your craft.