RESOURCES Exploration

All of the sites I mention here are educational sites in one way or another. They all have tutorials and most of them have freebies. They are all free!

http://vector.tutsplus.com/

Vector Tuts is an innovative, progressive site. There are many tutorials, not just on Flash but also Illustrator, Photoshop, web design, and multiple others in this group. It is not just one site but many; although I will concentrate on the Vector Tut site. They do interviews with designers that have been designing for many years as well as designers who have only been designing for a short time. They send out a weekly and a monthly newsletter with inspiration in it. Many of the pieces I have seen, left me with a “How did they do that?” thought.

There is a section of vector Tuts that is for paying members, they send our “premium” tutorials to everyone on their mailing list but only the paying members can see all of the “premium” tutorials. They send out other tutorials also, I have found that the only real difference between these two types of tutorials is that the “premium” ones are longer and in only some cases more through.

Here is their site for what they feel were their best tutorials for January 2011 http://vector.tutsplus.com/articles/news/best-of-tuts-january-2011/. Most of these tutorials are written, which I personally prefer.

The next site is http://www.incredibletutorials.com/

They have a nice column off to the right that has other tutorials that are similar or have something to do with the tutorial that was clicked. Which is nice if there is another part before or after the current one. These are video tutorials and some are quite long. The making a cartoon Background one is over an hour but they are very through. Again, a good variety of subjects are included.

http://layersmagazine.com/category/flash

Another site that doesn’t work with just one program. This site has a mix of video and written tutorials, as you can see you can look at tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, Aftereffects and Premiere Pro. Again, tutorials are very through, and varied in topic. Interesting articles can be downloaded in the magazine-downloads section.

http://www.youthedesigner.com/category/adobe-tutorials/

The last great site I’ll talk about today is You The Designer…this was a new site I literally ran across in trying to go to a different site, it just popped up. But I’m glad it did. This site covers a bunch of different software, I don’t know anyone that uses GIMP, but it might be interesting to learn about it. I didn’t see any mention of Flash but Photoshop and Illustrator are both present. Several of the tutorials mentioned here are actually Vector Tut’s and at least one is from Vector Tips, another pointed to gomediazine.com. So I can’t talk about the quality of the tutorials as that could be different at each site, but it is nice to have just one place to go to pick what you want to see.

Several of these sites have a freebies section, which is always nice as long as the quality hold up.

One site I didn’t mention that I just can’t ignore is VecTips, it is one of my favorites, I have found that the quality is always there and their variety is very good as well. Oh, and they also have good freebies!