Ebook Quality Assurance
https://www.lynda.com/Graphic-Design-tutorials/Ebook-Quality-Assurance/651193-2.html
Quality assurance is one of the most important steps in ebook creation, but also one of the most overlooked. This course was designed to teach anyone—regardless of their technical skills—how to effectively test and validate EPUB, Kindle, and other ebook files on different devices. Learn the inner workings of ebook file formats, which technologies affect how an ebook displays on different devices, and the differences between fixed layout and reflowable ebooks. Instructor Joshua Tallent also discusses unique retailer specifications and device limitations, how to load ebooks on different devices for testing, and essential details on performing automated and manual quality assurance testing.
Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory
https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Drawing-Vector-Graphics-Laboratory/475456-2.html
Sometimes you need to experiment to grow as an artist. What better place to try out new design ideas than the Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory? Every Wednesday, Von Glitschka introduces a new method, tool, or resource to stretch your creative muscle and explore a new artistic style. Each lesson pulls back the curtain on Von's design process—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to give beginners the self-confidence they need to start drawing and provide experts an inside look at a fellow professional's workflow.
Drawing Vector Graphics: Isometric Illustration
Isometric illustrations offer a unique view, perfect for technical illustrations, city scenes, and retro-inspired design. What they lack in perspective, they make up for in clarity, and have been used to diagram complex information for centuries. In this course, illustrator Von Glitschka shows how to create detailed isometric views of buildings, vehicles, and even people using Adobe Illustrator. He builds basic isometric shapes, automates parts of the process with actions and Smart Guides, and incorporates color and detail into the final design. The course closes with an artist spotlight and a challenge to get you thinking isometrically.
Drawing Vector Graphics: Brand Character Design
Brand characters—visual personas that represent a company or product—can have a powerful impact on how audiences feel about your brand. This course walks through how to design a compelling brand character using the world's leading vector illustration software: Adobe Illustrator. Instructor Von Glitschka begins by demonstrating how to research the creative cues needed to design a brand character, and then moves to the development of the character: styling, sketching, building, and coloring vector-based character art, and choosing the right typography. Final deliverables are addressed, as well as how clients can use your character design for promotion.
Drawing Simplified Maps in Illustrator
https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Drawing-Simplified-Maps-Illustrator/667365-2.html
Mapping is a common design task. Designers are asked to reinterpret map data to make a location—think a theme park or college campus—seem friendlier or more approachable. In this course, Tony Harmer teachers you how to create a simple, easy-to-read map in Illustrator, using the ArcGIS plugin and other basic reference tools. Tony explains what you should consider before drawing your map, including its purpose, audience, and destination (print or digital), and then shows how to build a map that is scaled correctly and includes important topographical features and landmarks, such as roads and buildings. He enhances the map with dynamic markers, perspective, and labels, and then he shows how to add motion and interactivity to make your maps more useful in today's connected world.
Designing Emotion: How To Use Design To Move People
Great designers are empaths. They harness the power of emotional response to connect to audiences and inspire action. If you want your designs to move people, you need to understand the role emotion plays in your work. Join Stefan Mumaw for this fun and frank exploration, which probes the human condition for lessons that can be used in any design project: from branding campaigns to product packaging. Stefan explains how emotion, rational thought, and culture impact our reactions to design, and how you can use different choices and tools—layout, typography, color, and more—to trigger different emotions and achieve connection with your brand, product, or service.
Designing a Resume for Creatives
https://www.lynda.com/InDesign-tutorials/Designing-Resume-Creatives/628694-2.html
Whether you're a recent college grad or a seasoned professional, your resume is the most important career document in your job-search arsenal. Resumes are particularly crucial for creatives, as they're a place where professionals can showcase their design prowess to hiring managers. In this course, Ina Saltz provides you with a fresh perspective on how to present yourself through a visually strong, content-rich resume. She takes a comprehensive and critical look at how to create your career story, explaining what you must know and do to make a recruiter's first impression of you memorable and actionable. Ina goes beyond the basic resume and includes presentation options for creatives, including how to keep a cohesive look and approach. Along the way, she shares best practices and explains how to avoid common resume errors.
Design Thinking: Data Intelligence
https://www.lynda.com/Graphic-Design-tutorials/Design-Thinking-Data-Intelligence/618718-2.html
Yesterday big data was all the rage; today we have intelligent machines and processes to leverage that data wisely. Learn how modern data intelligence helps designers provide a more personal and human design experience. Randall Elliott, associate director of design technology at frog, shows how to use data in creative problem-solving: to generate ideas, create better designs, and connect with users in meaningful ways. He tackles data generated by computers as well as that gathered through interviews and other hands-on means. He shows how to collect, analyze, and visualize the information to help solve your customer's challenges, leveraging intelligent tools and agile processes such as rapid prototyping.
Design Research: Enhancing the Designer-Client Relationship
The success of a design relies on an effective exchange of knowledge between the client and the designer. This course can help you create a more productive relationship with your client, earn more buy-in, and ultimately strengthen the knowledge base within your design process. Throughout the course, instructor Andy Schwanbeck steps through how to effectively bring your client into your design process. Andy shows how to utilize your knowledge base to help you understand what your client is really asking for and establish the right research questions. He also explains how to facilitate effective workshops. To wrap up the course, he covers how to harness your most significant findings to develop a stable foundation for decision-making throughout your design process.
Design a High-Impact Sell Sheet
https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Design-High-Impact-Sell-Sheet/696875-2.html
Great sales sheets grab the attention of a customer at first glance. There are a variety of types, but successful sales sheets share common features: strong layout, typography, color, and content. This course teaches designers—and marketers who may not be trained designers—how to design high-impact, eye-catching sales sheets that sell your products and services in just one page. Instructor Amy Balliet, the CEO of Killer Infographics, explains why a sales sheet matters and why it's important to define its audience, purpose, and call to action up front. She shows how to lay out your sheet and combine data and visuals in an effective way. She also helps you choose colors and typography that enhance your message and your brand. Finally, see how all the design elements combine in a start-to-finish project using Adobe Illustrator.
Design a Condensed Sans Serif Typeface
https://www.lynda.com/Glyphs-App-tutorials/Design-Condensed-Sans-Serif-Typeface/616713-2.html
Learn the basics of constructing a condensed sans-serif font using Glyphs App, the premier software for designing type. Instructor Charles Nix takes you through the design process along a logical path, building from simple elements to a complete font. He shows how to create lowercase and uppercase forms, as well as numbers and punctuation. Once the font is complete, learn about refining it with spacing and kerning, and discover strategies for making the font your own. Charles closes with advice and resources for further exploration of the gothic condensed form and typography in general.
CSS: Selectors
https://www.lynda.com/CSS-tutorials/CSS-Selectors/800217-2.html
Discover how to effectively leverage the power of selectors to select the elements you want to style without adding classes, changing HTML, or getting overly specific with your selectors. In this course, instructor Jen Kramer demonstrates how to pinpoint specific parts (and groups of parts) in an HTML document using the powerful declarative syntax of CSS selectors. Jen covers combinator selectors, attribute selectors, pseudo-class and pseudo-element selectors, and the universal selector. She also offers tips for determining which selectors might not be supported by your browser choices and shares best practices for mixing selectors in your document. And because this is an easily-tested syntax, Jen includes questions at the end of most videos to reinforce your understanding of each concept.
Creativity for All
https://www.lynda.com/course-tutorials/Creativity-All/774900-2.html
The word "creativity" can conjure up images of groundbreaking stand-up routines and paintings that inspire awe hundreds of years after the artist's final brush stroke. But creativity isn't just possessed by a brilliant few. All of us—from accountants to event planners—regularly perform creative acts. It's what allows us to reorient a project gone awry or capture the perfect shot of our friend beaming at their birthday party. Our brains already have the built-in machinery to be wildly creative—some of us just need a bit of clarity on the process. This lively series provides you with precisely that. Get weekly tips that can help you nurture your spontaneous impulses, reignite dormant creative powers, and leverage your innate creativity in all areas of your life. New instructors will be introduced as the course unfolds, allowing you to access a variety of unique takes on the creative process. Tune in every Friday for a new tip.
Creating Art with Your Desktop Scanner
https://www.lynda.com/Photoshop-tutorials/Creating-Art-Your-Desktop-Scanner/718633-2.html
This course focuses on scanning using a desktop scanner for both personal and professional creative purposes. Learn how to get started using and controlling scanning equipment to create intriguing and attractive art. Learn how to get started using and controlling scanning equipment. Discover unconventional scanning techniques for making advanced compositions. See how to export your digital scans into a program like Photoshop to make the most of their visual impact, and much more
Creating Accessible PDFs
https://www.lynda.com/Acrobat-tutorials/Creating-Accessible-PDFs/669540-2.html
Accessibility means making sure your content is available to as many people as possible. When you make your PDFs accessible, it means adding tags, bookmarks, alt text, and other information that makes the files readable and navigable to users who are visually or mobility impaired. Using the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat DC, Microsoft Word, and Adobe InDesign, it's now much easier to create valid, accessible PDFs. In this course—completely revised for 2018—Chad Chelius shows how to take an existing PDF file and remediate it for users of assistive software. He then introduces two workflows for creating accessible PDFs from scratch—one in Word and one in InDesign—with some special considerations for Excel and PowerPoint. Along the way, he offers techniques, tips, and tricks to make accessibility easy to incorporate in every document you publish.
Consulting Foundations
https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Consulting-Foundations/599602-2.html
Consulting is a top-paying, high-growth career path that comes with benefits like being able to set your own schedule and define the type of work you do. Whether you want to make the move into the consulting field or become more established and competitive as a consultant, this course can help you both set up and manage a consulting business. Join Mike Figliuolo as he covers the critically important components of consulting—including marketing, selling, contracting, managing engagements, and business administration. Learn how to optimize the time and effort you spend, follow best practices, and avoid common pitfalls. He shares instructions and insights related to expanding client relationships, running engagements, responding to RFPs, protecting intellectual property, getting licensed, and more.
Cert Prep: AutoCAD Certified Professional
https://www.lynda.com/AutoCAD-tutorials/Cert-Prep-AutoCAD-Certified-Professional/661760-2.html
Become an AutoCAD certified professional. This training course helps you study for the Autodesk certification exam while you reinforce your CAD skills. Shaun Bryant helps you understand the two pathways available: Autodesk Certified User—for new designers who want to demonstrate basic proficiency—and Autodesk Certified Professional—for those who possess more advanced skills and can solve complex workflow and design challenges. He then walks through basic drawing skills, object manipulation techniques, and organization skills necessary to pass both certification exams. Plus, learn how to reuse content to be more efficient, annotate drawings, and set your AutoCAD designs up for printing.
Building an Online Portfolio
https://www.lynda.com/Behance-tutorials/Building-Online-Portfolio/642472-2.html
Successful creative professionals know that great gigs start with a great portfolio. An online portfolio site can market your services to clients around the world. It helps explain your vision and your process, and showcase examples of your best work. In this course, SCAD professor Jason Fox shows how to build an expertly curated portfolio that reveals who you are as a designer and the value you can offer clients. He explains how to set your mission, establish your narrative, and tell your story. A strong emphasis is placed on selecting a diverse range of work. Jason also shows how to demonstrate your collaborative skills. By the end of the course, you will understand how to build out a portfolio that best represents your artistic brand.
Brand Strategy for Designers
https://www.lynda.com/course-tutorials/Brand-Strategy-Designers/716056-2.html
Designers: If you've ever wanted to be involved with the long-term strategy for a brand, not just the design, this is the course for you. Learn how to partner with stakeholders and company leaders to define the core elements of a solid brand: its purpose, audience, and position in the marketplace. Instructor Stefan Mumaw—a design consultant to such prestigious brands as Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, and Sony—explains how to turn those ingredients into a cohesive strategy. He also shows how to leverage the strategy to build out individual design elements, such as the company logo. Whether you're building a business from scratch or evolving an existing identity, these tips will help you create a compelling brand—one that moves customers to action and inspires lasting connection.
Brand Redesign: Small Business
https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Brand-Redesign-Small-Business/672251-2.html
Rebranding can help a company rebuild a reputation or go in a new direction. For designers, rebranding projects present a challenge, since the business has a history and a visual identity that the public already recognizes. The solution lies in a systematic approach: auditing the brand to discover what works and what doesn't, fixing the problems, and relaunching the brand with marketing campaigns that position the company for success.
Brad Feld on Validating Your Startup Idea
https://www.lynda.com/Business-tutorials/Brad-Feld-Validating-Your-Startup-Idea/756290-2.html
So you have an idea for a business. Maybe you have lots of ideas, with lots of potential. How do you focus on the opportunity that is going to be the most successful and the best use of your time? Brad Feld is a serial entrepreneur turned investor, who has helped build 100s of companies over the last 30 years, including Techstars, his startup accelerator. In this course, he walks through the preliminary steps that any entrepreneur needs to follow to determine whether an idea has merit: whether it is significant, meaningful, and disruptive. He provides a framework to evaluate an idea and its risks—as well the costs of not pursuing the idea at all. He then explains, in detail, how to evaluate your opportunity, your product, your market, and your team. These steps lay the groundwork critical to a successful startup, resulting in a refined and well-researched idea that you, your partners, your customers, and potentials investors can all get behind.
Brad Feld on Raising Capital
https://www.lynda.com/Business-tutorials/Brad-Feld-Raising-Capital/756289-2.html
To get a business off the ground or take it to the next level, entrepreneurs often need extra cash. Venture financing, where money is raised from venture capital firms or individual investors as opposed to a public institution like a bank, is a popular avenue. But how do you decide if financing makes sense for your business? How much money do you need? And who do you ask? Brad Feld is an investor who has overseen thousands of rounds of venture financing, enabling companies like Zynga, MakerBot, and Fitbit to grow from startups to established enterprises. In this course, he walks you through the process of evaluating, finding, and securing funding for your business. Learn about the different stages of financing, the many types of investors, and different avenues of funding: traditional convertible debt and equity and newer practices such as crowdfunding and pre-sales. Brad helps you zero in on a solution that's right for your business and develop a mindset for success.
Bootstrap 4 with Sass
https://www.lynda.com/Bootstrap-tutorials/Bootstrap-4-Sass/585273-2.html
Bootstrap is the most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first websites. When you combine it with Sass, you get CSS superpowers and a level of customization that makes Bootstrap even more powerful. This course explores the differences between regular Bootstrap and the new Sass-driven version, Bootstrap 4, and shows how to use the Sass-enabled features to build more customized sites. Instructor Ray Villalobos shows how to install libraries to add custom fonts, icons, and animations; use Sass variables, maps, and mixins to create custom layouts; modify global settings; and customize existing components with CSS and Sass.
Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training
Autodesk Civil 3D is a design and documentation solution for civil engineering. By learning to use Civil 3D, you can improve project performance, maintain consistent data and processes, and respond faster to change. This course introduces the basics of the software to new Civil 3D users. Instructor Josh Modglin shows how to model a surface, lay out parcels, and design geometry, including the making of horizontal alignments and vertical profiles. Next, he demonstrates how to create corridors, cross-sections, gravity pipe networks, and pressure pipe networks. Then he covers working with feature lines and grading objects, and wraps up by providing an overview of the plan production tools. Each chapter is full of shortcuts and tips to make your workflow smoother and more efficient, and will help you capitalize on the unique benefits of Civil 3D compared to other civil design software.
