Erik Akers

All over the web there are a lot of great sites with tuto­ri­als for every design pro­gram out there, and almost all of them very use­ful. But in the larger scheme of things are tuto­ri­als a bad thing for the design community?

Everyone’s a Designer

I have many times posted about the idea that every­one thinks they are a designer and tuto­ri­als for a large part feed right into that. Every day count­less peo­ple get on the inter­net and watch or read a tuto­r­ial that a tal­ented and skill­ful designer has cre­ated, then they com­plete all the steps chang­ing very lit­tle and pass it off as their own work.

I’ve seen work in people’s port­fo­lios that I know were designed after an online tuto­r­ial and then the designer tried to pass it off as their own. I’m not going to name sites, but there are many of them out there, where a user asks for some­one to fig­ure out how an effect was cre­ated in other piece of work. Some­one then sits down and fig­ures out the steps in Pho­to­shop or some design pro­gram and writes or records a tuto­r­ial on how its done. Which then leads to a num­ber of copy cat designs show­ing up. Hurt­ing the cre­ative mind peo­ple that orig­i­nally came up with the ideas because it now seems that every­one can cre­ate the same look.

Types of Tutorials

When I was putting together my thoughts for this post I started look­ing around tuto­r­ial sites. I was hop­ing I would be able to zero in on a type of tuto­r­ial that I felt was the biggest offender to my idea of tuto­ri­als being bad. Well there was not just one type of tuto­r­ial that stuck out, though my gut feel­ing that Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor tuto­ri­als were prob­a­bil­ity the worst didn’t get dis­proved, I just couldn’t say one set was really the worst. But here are my views in terms of the types of tuto­ri­als out there.

• Photoshop/Illustrator — I just think there are too many “how tos” when it comes to Pho­to­shop tuto­ri­als. They pretty much make some­one with­out a cre­ative bone in their body a pseudo artist. The tuto­ri­als range from step by step books and arti­cles to videos. Some artists take an idea from a Pho­to­shop tuto­r­ial and expand on it, but most take exactly want the tuto­r­ial showed them and try to pass it off as some­thing they came up with.
• Web/Flash/CSS/Coding — I love these type of tuto­ri­als, most authors do a great job of show­ing what can done with­out show­ing how they did it. Give the viewer the chance to fig­ure it out on their own and learn some­thing in the process. Or, authors give view­ers a base to start with, but skip major part of their process to not give away all of their secrets.

In all, I think tuto­ri­als are a good for the design com­mu­nity, but I think there is a major amount of peo­ple that don’t learn any­thing from tuto­ri­als and just want to copy what it’s show­ing them to do. And there in lies the prob­lem.   I think, if you read or watch a tuto­r­ial the hope would be that you’ll take the ideas and con­cepts and mold or shape them into your own.

With that said, start­ing in the next cou­ple of weeks I’m going to begin pub­lish­ing tuto­ri­als here. Although I’m going to try and take a dif­fer­ent approach.  Rather than just list­ing out the steps needed to get an effect, I’m going to show my process of how I work through prob­lems that I encounter.