Design blogs are a great source of articles, news and resources – specially if you use mainstream softwares like Photoshop and Illustrator. One of the most popular posts, and the one I’d like to discuss here, are the tutorials and how good or bad it can affect you as a designer.

A Critical View

Tutorials are a good way for learning new techniques. You can see how the designer uses the software. You can discover filters and functions that you’ve never seen or used before. All just by following a few instructions.
But is this enough?
Ok, it may take you from point A (empty canvas) to point B (kick-ass final result) but what have you learnt in the process? Did you pay attention to the journey between those points?

Learning, Playing, Copying

I am talking about how to use information. Don’t get me wrong, tutorials are great! I read them frequently and will probable post a couple in this blog too; however, people should be more critical about it and take it to the next level.

The Good, The Bad and The Tips

Below are lists of pros, cons and tips related to the use of tutorials.

Pros

• It helps you learn new techniques and the logic behind each action taken;
• Makes you think outside the box and do something unusual or different that you’re used to;
• Enables you to view each step taken by other designers to achieve certain effect;
• It’s a good way to work out your design skills, you might not use the whole tutorial on your next project, but some details will definitely be part of your design repertoire.

Cons

• If used in a mechanical way you become a designer-robot: you will have to look back at the tutorial every time you want to achieve the same results;
• Imitation instead of creation;
• If your learning method is limited to tutorials you’ll never be a self taught person; which is quite essential in the web design business;
• Easy (and a bit lazy) way to achieve specific effect.

Tips

• Try to understand why the designer is using that specific filter or technique. Is this the only way? Could you achieve the same results using something else?
• Be different and innovate, what would happen if you skip one step and alter the values of that other filter? You don’t have to do exactly the same as the author suggests, the idea is to learn and not imitate;
• Whenever possible, use different sources of tutorials and try to combine different ideas to create the same result.

What Do You Think?

What are your thoughts on tutorials? Do you use them often? How do you use them?
Use the comments section below to share your opinion.

Making and Breaking the Grid, by Timothy Samara, is an analysis of the construction and deconstruction of grid-based designs. Featuring a comprehensive showcase of works in different media and across several decades.

The Book

The book is basically divided into 2 parts. The first one about the creation of the grid-based designs and its usage. The second one explains the deconstruction of the grid, a different approach on design in which the grid doesn’t have to obey any rules.
In the first few pages the reader will be immersed into the historical facts surrounding the development of the grid-based design. There is a lot of information here – about 150 years of art & design evolution in only 7 pages – maybe a timeline would be interesting. But then again, this is not a history book.

The next chapter the author slows down the pace and starts a workshop about grid design. The content here is precise, clear enough for beginners and a good read for advanced designers. Concepts and styles are illustrated in a simple yet effective way and the examples are spot on.

Then the showcase begins. Pages and pages of great artwork from different decades and styles. Each of them with its own grid style – column, modular grid, etc. Description and comments explain how it was used and the effect generated by it.

Conclusion

As an introduction to grid-design, Making and Breaking the Grid does its job. It will give the initial hints and ideas of layout structure in a few pages but doesn’t go very deep. The highlight of the book, without any doubt, is the showcase of designs. Big illustrations and photographs with detailed information. Definitely a must-have on any designer library.

Click here for a preview on Google Books.

I must admit that typography wasn’t always my favourite field in design. Until a couple years ago fonts and texts were mere supporting actors of the design movie. My mind changed when I finally realized that typography is as important as the shapes, the colours and the styles used. One of the books that helped me get there was Thinking with Type, by Ellen Lupton.

Overall idea of the book

Always using history as a guide, the author shows how the letters and texts can influence the way we see a piece of design and how we can improve readability by following some rules. Personally, one of these tips that really caught my attention was: When using stacked letters – like the ones on spines of books – we should always use small caps with centred column. Maybe this is common sense to some people, but for me it was something that I had never realized.

The book is also very rich on examples. Fonts familiar to most designers – or anyone in the field – are presented and described throughout the pages. Futura, for example, was designed in the late 20′s by Paul Renner who sought on “honest expression of technical processes”. But be warned, as the author constantly says, this is not a book about fonts.

“The relationships among letters in a font are more important than the identity of individual characters.”

History or Design Book?

If you are not into history and want to get straight to the technical part you might want to skip a few pages, but by doing this you’ll miss the best part of the book, like when the author explains the reason of the terms uppercase and lowercase: in the old printshops, they used to store the case of the capital letter in the upper drawer). Historical fact or plain curiosity, at least it helps to make the reader more comfortable with the subject.

Conclusion

From letters to text, grid layout to html, Thinking with Type is a book that explains the use of typography in different media and for different audiences. This may not be your ultimate guide about it, but will surely be on your mind in your next designs.