• Manchester United the-business-entity-dash-football-club has been taken over, by a US investor Rob Glaser no less. [from Reuters RSS]
• The Creative Commons - BzzAgent controversy ends, and gives birth to spreadCC. Its a long story, and I had planned on blogging about it but I got tired...
• Meanwhile in other CC news a few ccMixters got some mainstream-media airtime. [both  bullets from the Lessig Blog]
  
• A new projectile gun concept using centrifugal force. Supposedly it will fire more projectiles per second and be much quiter than conventional gunpowder firearms. Appropriately its called DREAD. [via Boing Boing]
• Tony Pierce reviews the new Weezer album and later retracts it. [from Tony's Busblog, of course]
• Darknet: The Installments. [from JOHO the Blog]
  
• Kevin Sites wins 2005 Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. He later posted the full, unedited Fallujah video which got him in his ethics conundrum (I'll rediscover the link to his blog post of the Fallujah incident Real Soon Now™, but... Here's the link to his post about the Fallujah video. Here's his blog). [from Boing Boing]
• CNet reports IBM's endorsement of Firefox. [from Adot's NotBlog]
• Jenn Shreve, not a "real" journalist? [from Boing Boing]
• Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases. [from Wired News]
  
• Moment of accidentally anal Brazilian university zen. [from Boing Boing]
• I'd also like to remind Indonesians among you (most likely still the majority audience of this blog) of the excellent recent posts from fellow Indonesian bloggers (in no particular order; except for that one linked to 'Indonesian' which I add to this list somewhat reluctantly...) (and you say you hated chaos?)
• And as a final note to those who may have asked, I got these by surfing too long, made even better (worse?) by my harvested RSS feeds collected using Thunderbird. Oh and a little help from Google News, too. All using a pay-by-the-minute dial-up internet connection (which is too expensive in Indonesia now that we have flatrate GPRS Internet from our local cell operator Indosat)
  

originally posted to [Graphic Design Arena] @ Yahoo!Groups

[snip] wrote:

Hey,

I am going to attend CSUN next year and my major is Graphic Designing. Guys have any tips? I'm not going in cold turkey, i design wallpapers and logos with photoshop, but what else should i learn about to become a GD?

thanks!

Very interesting question. Now since I came from a collegiate communication background (focusing on advertising communications) I've barely gotten any formal graphic design education (aside from a single 3-credit course on GD and visual communications). But I would like to think that this is a question I encounter every day at my work as a freelancer (not necessarily GD, sometimes copy, sometimes something as completely unrelated as live translating). I don't know 'bout the States (I'm assuming you're from the States), but nowadays over at my corner of the world GDs are supposed to be the Masters of the Universe when it comes to digital visual art. Being good with Photoshop is very, very important but you can't survive on Photoshop alone.

The first natural extension to your skill set would obviously be vector graphic tools. Illustrator's the top dog in the States (or so I've heard) but over here in Jakarta most ad agencies use Freehand. You could learn CorelDRAW (and Corel's graphic suite) but a lot of agencies have abandoned using it (them). It seems that getting bought by Microsoft only got them to merely survive as opposed to actually thriving. And if you do go with Illustrator (which is disadvantaged in page layouting capabilities compared to Freehand due to its single-page paradigm) then you should familiarize yourself with a bona-fide page-layout program such as QuarkXpress or Adobe's InDesign.

Next up is any 3D tool; there's 3DS Max and Maya (each with their respective humongous list of supports and add-ons), and then there's also the popular Lightwave 3D and the popular open-source Blender3D tool (there's one more popular FOSS 3D tool, but I can't recall its name right now) [update: I remember it now: POV-Ray!]

And then there's animation. You may not encounter a lot of animation jobs depending on where you work, but its always useful to at least know a little Flash for cartoons and Adobe's Premiere for live video (and often times also for 2D/3D animation post-production tweaking). Even if you work solely with static images, knowing a little about these can help if and when you're asked to create animation-friendly work.

I mentioned Blender3D [blender3d.org] as an open-source alternative 3D tool, but Blender3D is far from being the only thing FOSS has to offer. For vector there's the Inkscape [inkscape.org] and Sodipodi [updated: sodipodi.com] project, and one can hardly mention anything about open-source bitmap/raster graphics (or any sort of FOSS graphics) without mentioning the GIMP [gimp.org]. Some people have made a GIMP animation package to use gimp to create web animations (potentially replacing Flash and Fireworks). And each and every one of these tools are available on multiple platforms, that is they're available (often times, but not always, as native ports) on Windows [this links to the Win32 port of the GIMP], Mac OS-X, various flavor of UNIX such as FreeBSD (and other BSD offshoots), Solaris, AIX, and, of course, GNU/Linux. But I'm just barely scratching the surface of FOSS CGD here.

But with all this talk about computer stuffs, we can't forget that visual art did not start with digital tools, and will not end solely with them, either. No matter how good you are with Photoshop (or Freehand in my case), once you are reasonably used to it, pencil sketching is always a much, much faster way of getting your visions (images in your head) on a tangible medium (ready to be further tweaked/processed later either on paper or digitally). Its faster to sketch with pencil and paper than using a mouse and screen (some places have graphic pen tablets/digitizers, but then we'd be talking 'bout the same skill sets again).

These are useful tools that you should look into, and this does look like a daunting list, but one thing you gotta remember is that these are only suggested skills. Rarely have I encountered anyone with complete mastery of all these tools (but I have met those that are familiar with all of them, and they are demigods), and most everyone just chooses one particular tool and get really, really good at it (some to complete mastery, and they too are demigods). I would suggest you familiarize yourself with as many of these tools as you can and then focus on getting really, really good with one. Though it doesn't hurt to get good with as many as you can manage. Remember that the only purpose served by these tools (digital or otherwise) is as a method of translating your thoughts and visions into something that others can 'see'. What you 'say' and how you 'say' it, I guess.

And finally there's the basic theories. Very important, often forgotten. Balance, color, lines, typography, media, perception, etc. But that's what you're going to GD school for, now isn't it?

Anyway best of luck to you, and I'm sure you'll have lotsa fun studying, and creating, GD.

update 18/05/05: I've made some addendums and corrections. The author regrets the errors :p