Thoughts on graphic arts training?

Scott F

Scott F

Pug Life
I must have seen (conservatively speaking) a bazilion "should I go to film school?" threads since I've been on these boards. Never thought I'd write up something along those lines. But here I am.

I've been doing production shooting & editing for many years now....really tightened my skillset to corporate work almost exclusively now. (any notions of narrative film making are out the window...sometimes I'm not sure why I still visit this site!) Think marketing videos, training, financial reports, some fashion vids & documentary work.....a mixed bag, but I've been finding a lot of my latest assignments are really text-heavy.

So if I could go back in time....dammit! Graphic arts classes in college!!!!! It was just something that never crossed my mind in the 90s. "I wanna work in TV! I wanna be a cameraman!" It would have been impossible for a 19-year-old me to wrap my head around where technology and our industry is today. Flash-forward to 2014. I deal with assets being handed off from graphic artists with expectations on what to do with them. I'm working in the usual programs like After Effects, etc. I need to raise my Illustrator skills at the very least.

Off the top of your head, any suggestions on quality (part time) eduction/courses/books/training, etc so I can boost my understanding of things like color theory, font selection....making things look "balanced" on screen? I've worked with tons of great graphic artists. But I'm not seeing what they're seeing. I don't have that training.



PS-I'm in Connecticut, not terribly far from NYC.
 
Haha, I totally hear you. That's pretty much me as well. I am a 'one man video company' and one of my
biggest challenges is things like typography, motion graphics, and so on. Now you can take .eps files
or Illustrator files, and turn them into 3D with NewBlue Titler Pro or Zaxwerks ProAnimator. Doesn't help
much if you can't use Illustrator to save your life. And as you said, just basic things like selecting the right
font, color, position on the screen....I can't tell you how much time I've wasted 'experimenting'.....I can kind of
'feel' when I've got it right, but I don't know how I did it, and so I spend forever trying to 'luck' into it.
And sometimes I just get burned out on spending so much time and just call it 'good enough'.

Six or seven years ago, I went on Amazon and bought all the Trish and Chris Meyer After Effects books. I'm also
an Apple Motion guy so I bought Patrick Sheffield's 'Cheating with Motion' book. Also went on Creative
Cow and bought a couple DVD's 'Graphics and Effects for Final Cut Studio 2' and 'Moving with Motion'.
More artistically, a book called 'Motion Design. Graphics for Television and Motion Pictures' by Matt Woolman
is pretty good. It talks about color theory and font placement and so on.
I also go watch lots of videos on this stuff at Creative Cow or anywhere I can find them.

My conclusion.....it's actually a lot harder than it looks, and like most things takes a ton of practice.
Problem is, I don't have a ton of time. I try to save anything that looks halfway decent that I create as
a 'preset' and build up a library of stuff I can use quickly. I still don't have a lot of 'presets' yet, but
I'm getting a few. Also try using templates from After Effects, Motion, Livetype, NewBlue Titler Pro,
Zaxwerks, or any other graphic templates you can find and 'deconstruct' them and see how they were made.
Sometimes you can slightly tweak them and make them unique. I feel your pain, I wish I had the time
to take a class or two on this stuff, assuming my local university even offers something like this.
 
  1. The Mac Is Not a Typewriter, 96 pages, $10. Don't judge a book by its page count. Like The Elements of Style, some of the best are the shortest. And it's not specific to Macs, except for keyboard shortcuts.

  2. Yale Style Guide. Ostensibly about the web but much applies to the television screen as well as other surfaces.

  3. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information or any of the other books by Edward Tufte. Computing Reviews said it is the best book on statistical graphics, and Amazon said it is one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the twentieth century.

 
Last edited:
You mentioned liking books, but this is a pretty sweet website: http://www.artofthetitle.com/

It's all about the title sequences that movies used often with interviews with the studios that produce them. It's cool to see examples of professional work and explained the thought process behind them.
 
HOW Magazine (online) is one of the better, established trade publications for graphic designers and art directors. HOW also holds traveling conferences and educational lectures--which are pretty amazing (if you're into that kind of stuff--which I am :). They now offer online courses, which I haven't tapped into myself, but I've been a subscriber and see their "How Design University" offerings.
http://www.howdesignuniversity.com/
 
...I've been working with graphic designers for corporate work for almost 20 years now, and one thing they all have in common is that they all "steal" design concepts from almost any source you can image, mainly because time is money and not many clients will give them the time to come up with original concepts from scratch. ( which can sometimes take weeks to thoroughly develop )

Now keep in mind that they are NOT "cloning" the original design concept, but rather creating their own flavor of the core idea, so if you looked at the finished product next to the work that inspired it there is something familiar happening there, but they are very very different.
 
I'm definitely in this boat as well.

I don't have any books or anything to contribute, but I'm very glad other people have recommended some, I'll be checking those out as well.

One thing that occurred to me when reading this is the variety of free online courses now. I know MIT has a ton of free course ware online, and I know they had a bunch of film/video classes.

I haven't poked around, but I'm sure there's some graphic design ones as well.
 
Guys, never mind the whole graphic arts thing....I've decided I want to be a DIT, so help me out with that instead.

Seriously, thanks for the feedback & suggestions. It means a lot. Interesting to see a few of you in the same boat.

At the very least, I just ordered that 'Mac isn't a typewriter book' and another one caught my eye on Amazon called 'Stop Stealing Sheep'. 26 dollar gamble, but it looked good.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top