What’s up, designer friends. This is where we talk about design and freelancing. Today, I want to answer a question which is pretty common. The question is, “I want to get into design, where should I start. There’s too much stuff. What is the right path for me? If you want free video tutorials and lessons, visit our YouTube Channel.
Learning with Available Resources | Calgary Web Design
I want to start by sharing my own story and then takeaways that can be applicable to where you are right now on your design journey. For me, I got into design back when I was in high school. It was over 20 years ago with an illegal version of photoshop. I started learning with the free resources that were available. The free resources were basically tutorials. YouTube wasn’t a big thing back in the time but tutorials, online tutorials, and books were available. Books, I look at as a free web design resource because they will cost you like $10 to $15. It’s almost free and everybody can afford them. I started learning and I started to play with photoshop and doing gigs for friends in high school. I actually got a few jobs from parents of people from my school.
After Finding the Interest
Later on, I thought that I was happy doing this and that I’m excited about doing this. I was quite good at it as well so I thought that I had lots of potential. I thought that designing was actually quite interesting. Once I had this kind of proof of concept that this can make money and I’m also enjoying doing this, I actually started to invest heavier. I started taking online courses back at the time. The only thing that was existed was lynda.com and that’s basically how I learned all of the software. I took tons of lynda.com courses. It is actually called LinkedIn Learning now so make sure to check their content out. That helped me get my first full-time position as a designer as a junior designer. Taking courses really helped me make some kind of a living with design. Check out True-E’s LinkedIn Account!
Get a Degree in an Official Web Design School | Calgary Web Design
After a while, I noticed that I’m actually plateauing. I didn’t move into interesting positions. I was stuck in my freelance job and I was really frustrated and I want to dive deeper. At that point, I’ve made a decision to kind of invest all in into a full-on design degree. you know there weren’t any like full-blown internet programs online back in the day. The only option was for me to dive deeper and get feedback from experts. This is basically the reason why I went into design school. I realized that learning online with online courses is great but at some point it might be limited. I wanted to get expert feedback so I decided to go into design school for four years. That was actually you know helped propel my career, give me the skills and the stuff that I needed to actually build a full-on career.
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Read the next part in my life: Steps to Learn Design pt2