Our beloved Photoshop, now in its 20th year, is quite simply the core of our digital imaging and design universe, and is certainly the most powerful and essential tool to have in your digital design toolbox. Another point, Photoshop is simply the most used program in the field too.

From business card to billboard, annual report to packaging, web site to TV ad, CS5 offers designers the complete toolset needed to quickly and reliably produce high-quality, unique, and visually compelling designs.

With clients expecting more and more from designers, especially freelancers, learning new digital skills has never been more essential!
I recently found an inspiring article online that showcased the works of designers who have taken the plunge, endure the short term pain and are now reaping the benefits of an extended repertoire of skills.

In this post, we discover and applaud the brilliant digital designers out there who are crossing the digital divide, contaminating arts with design disciplines and utilising new mediums for digital expression. I just can’t wait to see Troika’s founders Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel showcase their stuff at the Design Indaba this year.

In this course, you will build a solid foundation in Adobe Illustrator. You will start with a tour of important menus, tools, and palettes, then explore selection tools, drawing tools, layers, the pen tool (a lesson unto itself) as well as transformations/distortions, type tools, and modifying paths and shapes.

Learn Internet basics and how Browsers work, understand general web concepts. Study in depth HTML & XHTML, CSS (Cascading Stylesheets), Using the Text Editor, Web page layout, Adobe Photoshop, web graphics, web site architecture. Pricing also available for customised, group and/or on-site training.

Learn to typeset single and multi-page documents with professional results. Learn about document set up and typography basics, modifying documents and workflows, drawing techniques, advanced typography and tables, and preparation of documents for final production, print settings and preventing problems.

Learn Adobe Flash, essential Actionscript skills, about rich media sites and the use of multimedia in the Web, how to work with text on the web, Web page layout skills & web usability.

This video tutorial outlines new Live Preflight feature of Indesign CS4 which allows you to quickly find and fix problems. Even better, you can really rely on the tool to locate and display errors live, during design process.

Isolation in Context is a feature you can’t ignore in the new Illustrator CS4. Make changes to elements of your artowrk withouth having ti flick between menus and tools. By right clicking, you will have access to numerous object editing optios that one woud normally have to search for in various areas of the sfotware. A real timesaver, check it out here!