I recently got an email from someone who felt overwhelmed with all the apps they were trying to learn – learning Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver all at the same time can do that!
Do one thing at a time says I!
I’ve been there, where it seems there is so much to learn, that it becomes overwhelming. First, don’t make the mistake of believing the tools (Photoshop, Fireworks etc) are the goal – they are not. In fact, once you understand web design (development), you will likely being using 10% of Photoshop’s features … as an example.
That said, it is best to concentrate on one thing, get functional skills and then move on to the next. Jumping around and learning bits of this one day, and a bit of that another day, will just cost you time because you will be constantly shifting gears when moving from one subject/app to the other.
If you haven’t already caught them, I am releasing FREE videos from our new course on how to properly build a page layout in Photoshop to then take it to the Web.
In this video, we learn about preparing the screen dimensions for the Web in Photoshop:
I am now starting to release a bunch of free videos from our soon to be released Photoshop for the Web course. The complete video course (with source files) will be soon available on our video tutorial subscription service and soon thereafter as a download or DVD purchase.
The main goal is to teach you how to take a Photoshop CS4 based web page layout and to turn it into a website with the help of Dreamweaver CS4. Along the way, you will put to practice lessons learned from our series of articles on proper design.
Note: Even though we are using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, the lessons learned are pretty much usable with any Photo editing (The Gimp, Photopaint etc …) and web design software (Web Expression, Net Objects etc …) – these days, all these programs work in much the same way.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have an eye on things OUTSIDE the web design world … I pay attention to the stock market. Anyway, according to analysts who follow Adobe for investment purposes (Adobe is a large publicly traded company) Adobe should be releasing the CS5 suite of products by second quarter 2010.
… For non stock nerds, that means about mid 2010.
About the Adobe CS5 product line
Adobe (as is usual) will be releasing Photoshop CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Flash CS5 and all the other CS5 updates at the same time. And from the previews I’ve seen, it’s going to be a big update in terms of the new capabilities CS5 brings to the table:
Flash will have 3D physics – totally nuts!
Photoshop has new crazy powerful cloning tools.
Dreamweaver will make it really easy to insert live data into web pages via AJAX.
… And I’m sure a heck of a lot more.
We will have many videos and articles covering these new products when they become available.
