South Puget Sound Community College // May 25-26
Companion class: Producing brochures
Mastering design principles is a continuing education class offered by South Puget Sound Community College.
Do you need to create a stunning brochure, marketing piece or newsletter and don’t know where to begin? Do you regularly create communications pieces, but never had any formal training in graphic or web design? Do you just want to refine your skills by learning the basics of great design? If any of these apply to you, then Mastering Basic Design Principles is for you. This class is part of four-part communications class series, which uses Adobe Creative Suite, to give you a great foundation for designing for web and print.
This two-day course will include the basic principles, elements, and vocabulary of designing for both print and the web. You will get a brief introduction to using InDesign, Dreamweaver and Photoshop for design.
Course files and resources
- Dreamweaver
- InDesign
- Photoshop
- About Photoshop layers (from PPT)
- About Photoshop resizing (from PPT)
- TechSoup (for NFPs)
Examples (web)
- Farmers market brochure (Lynda.com)
- How fake news becomes a popular, trending topic (CBS 60 minutes)
- King County
- Mashable
- Seattle
- Seattle Public Library – access from other regional libraries
- Utah.gov
Design (general)
- 10 rules of composition that designers live by
- Books
- Color
- Don Norman (TEDTalk)
- Gestalt psychology
- Smashing Magazine
- Terminology
- 50 design terms explained for non-designers
- GIF, JPG, PNG, SVG: which to use?
- Illustrated glossary of typographic terms
- Urban dictionary of design slang (good for LOL)
- Visual design glossary (good info, great bad information design example)
- Widows and orphans
Design (web)
- Eye Movement
- Guides on how to approach web projects and commissioning web communication services.
- Legislative web sites, best & worst
- Magic escalator of acquired knowledge
- Page title tag best practices for Google (2015)
- Should I use a carousel?
- Understanding Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics (Slideshare)
- Jakob’s 10 Heuristics (1995)
- Web design resources (links)
Sourcing images
- Death To Stock Photo
- Flickr CC // The Commons
- Getty Open Content Program
- Google & Bing Image Search (special)
- Library of Congress
- National Park Service
- NOAA
- Public domain v Creative Commons (Harvard explainer)
- U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Wikimedia Commons
- Wikipedia, public domain image list