Welcome

- [Tony] Hello there. My name's Tony Harmer and I'd like to welcome you to this course introducing you to the world of graphic design, increasingly referred to these days as communication arts, but I think for the sake of clarity throughout, we'll stick with graphic design. This course has been written based on my experiences in enterprise design teams, small to medium businesses, as well as being a freelance designer for many, many years. You may well enjoy such variation in your career and indeed I hope that is the case.

I'm convinced variety is an essential component of keeping it fresh and real in this profession as it may be so in others. You're just starting out and what we've aimed for here and what I've tried to put together for you is the essential guide to becoming a graphic designer in an easy to digest form. We'll be covering the fundamental concepts and topics associated with being a graphic designer, looking at the elements of graphic design and using the recognized industry standard production tools.

There are quizzes at the end of each chapter and I'll also be giving you a few, small exercises to practice with. These are entirely self-guided and there's no actual answer to any of them. It will be up to you to self-critique, or maybe discuss with your peers, your friends, or even perhaps your family. You should find them fun though and they're nice to revisit from time to time. Some of the later chapters have exercise files so that you can work along and you can download those to your computer and keep them in a handy location while you're working throughout the course.

An overlay will tell you which file you need to have open.