I found this book extremely useful. I noticed the same publisher also has a new book just out, “GIMP for Absolute Beginners”, but I haven’t seen a copy so don’t know how it compares to the other.
Would it be easier to learn Photo Editing and Graphic Design with Adobe products - and supporting books - FIRST, and then go back and try to learn GIMP and Inkscape?
Clearly, the books for Photoshop and Illustrator blow any other books out of the water.
Put another way…
Is the trick to learning GIMP and Inkscape a combination of a.) Understanding Design Concepts, and b.) Knowing how to do generic Design things in any tool, or is it all about those tools themselves?
For instance, if you can pass your written and driving exam - in the U.S. - and you understand basic (tool) concepts like how to use a Steering Wheel, Brakes, Shifter, Turn Signals, and so on, then realistically you can drive nearly any car, right?
Is that true for going between Photoshop and GIMP and Illustrator and Inkscape, or are they so different that it would be like going from MS Access to Oracle or from a tricycle to a Harley?!
Debbie
[FONT=Verdana]
I can’t see why. I’ve never used Photoshop or Illustrator (although I did use Macromedia Fireworks some years ago).
Clearly? It’s not clear to me. (: [/FONT]
I beg to differ:
docs: http://inkscape.org/doc/index.php?lang=en
books: http://inkscape.org/books/index.php?lang=en
tutorials: http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/
to list only those on the official page.
To paraphrase, Photoshop is to graphic design what Dreamweaver is to web developing. You need to get down to the basics first. So start with the basics about vectors: paths, nodes, Bézier curves. Learn about layers.
All this knowledge has nothing to do with the fact that the graphic tool of your choosing is proprietary or open source, as it works the same in all.
I suggest you start here: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/index.php. A pretty good start.
No offense, but then you clearly haven’t walked into a decent-sized Barnes & Noble and looked in the Graphic Design section.
There are HUNDREDS of decent books on Photoshop and Illustrator, and I think I have only seen 3-4 on GIMP and Inkscape. And those were pretty lame as I recall, including that they had virtually no photos or illustrations in the books?!
Debbie
Is that true for going between Photoshop and GIMP and Illustrator and Inkscape, or are they so different that it would be like going from MS Access to Oracle or from a tricycle to a Harley?!
I don’t use Photoshop, but I still like to think I drive a harly. I graphics package is about 1/5 if that of designing a website. All you need is a basic graphics prorgam with guides, colour (gradient and solid colors) which easily allows you to insert photos and imagery as well as define dimentions. I know of people who use PhotoShop daily to design web pages, but don’t have a clue about HTML or CSS. I hate to say it, but many use Dreamweaver to create tabled layouts on their sites.
Web design is focused on the technolgies we use. HTML, CSS, Optimization, JavaScript etc. Graphics software really don’t count so much. I don’t think it’s good to add so much value on using a graphics package. This being said, I would also be very interested in learning something like Gimp or Inkscape, as I could truly focus on open-source.
PS: been using Open Office for 6+ years, would never consider using Ms Office again!
Edit: Macromedia lol! Last time I used their products was in 2004 if I remember correctly.
[QUOTE=itmitică;5113895]To paraphrase, Photoshop is to graphic design what Dreamweaver is to web developing. You need to get down to the basics first. So start with the basics about vectors: paths, nodes, Bézier curves. Learn about layers.
All this knowledge has nothing to do with the fact that the graphic tool of your choosing is proprietary or open source, as it works the same in all.
I suggest you start here: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/index.php. A pretty good start.[/QUOTE]
So other than the link you provided, are there any books that teach these concepts?
Any books you would recommend? (Sorry, I’m old-school and prefer paper when learning!)
Thanks,
Debbie
Reading books would only get you so far, so stop chasing this approach. Having to get things done is the best teacher, I’m sure you already know that.
I would recommend a “learn by doing” approach. That’s how I learned anyway. Whenever I wanted to make this graphic or that graphic, I fired up Inkscape and I made sure Google is on. I read the docs, then I learned about different approaches others have. Then I weighted the good ones and I dismissed the bad one.
Doing that will add little by little to your knowledge and understanding. Otherwise, the concepts involved may fly right over your head. There’s a Romanian saying “Nevoia te învață” having this English equivalent “The wind in one’s face makes one wise”. Stick to that, whether it’s MS Access or Oracle.
[QUOTE=itmitică;5113907]Reading books would only get you so far, so stop chasing this approach. Having to get things done is the best teacher, I’m sure you already know that.
I would recommend a “learn by doing” approach. That’s how I learned anyway. Whenever I wanted to make this graphic or that graphic, I fired up Inkscape and I made sure Google is on.
Doing that will add little by little to your knowledge and understanding. Otherwise the concepts involved may fly right over your head. There’s a Romanian saying “Nevoia te învață” having this English equivalent “The wind in one’s face makes one wise”. Stick to that, whether it’s MS Access or Oracle.[/QUOTE]
Some more follow up questions…
1.) So with that in mind, and leveraging the links you guys provided above, how long - on average - do you think it would take me to go from zero knowledge of GIMP and Inkscape to where I was creating moderately complicated things for my website?
2.) When would you guess that I would be at a point where I had enough knowledge that I could start building things even if simple things - to use on my website? (e.g. gradients, buttons, logos, icons, graphics, etc.)
3.) With respect to building a website, would you start off learning GIMP first, or Inkscape first, or do them in tandem?
Thanks,
Debbie
P.S. I hand-coded my entire website with the help of LOTS of people on SitePoint, so understand that I am not a DreamWeaver person…
Depends on how much time you have for this particular task, considering you’d have to also make progress on php (oop, templating systems), css (better layouts, media queries) and others, and what’s the attention intensity you’re prepared to give to this particular learning task.
To create childish and awkward looking graphics could take you no more than 2-3 months. To create well sized, beautifully proportioned and rightly colored yet simple graphics, up to a year.
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The thing that you have to understand is that by learning to work with a graphic application and understanding the principles behind vector graphics doesn’t replace the natural talent for design, the eye for the right sizes, for the good shapes, and for the right colors. That one, you have it or you struggle to form it, and it could be the one most consuming task of all.
Being a “PSD jockey” is hard as nuts, don’t listen to those that tell you otherwise. It’s tough job, making good graphics.
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I’m a vector graphics addict. I always start with Inkscape. I don’t use Gimp, I don’t need it. I only use Paint.net, after I get what I need in Inkscape.
Due to being poor and stingy, it’s pretty much all I use, except I think my version of VirtualBox was the paid version to get USB support or something… everything I use is open source. Apache, Linux, Gimp, the browsers…
I have a lot of trouble thinking in vectors. It held me back when trying to do things in Inkscape and it held me back when trying to do things in Flash, during that brief time I tried and hated doing Flash. Flash was originally planned to be a vector graphics program, rather than something to make movies and animations with.
I can barely write my own name in Inkscape, so you can’t call me an expert in that. But I have seen results from Inkscape by professional graphic designers that blows off pants, so to speak, and have heard their opinions on Inkscape compared to other tools they’d used such as FreeHand and Illustrator. Last I checked, the conclusion was that Inkscape was nice to use and intuitive to those coming from (the discontinued) FreeHand but that it was still missing some cherished things from Illustrator, and at the time also you could not open .ai files in Inkscape (you can today).
For GIMP, which I’m also no expert but I feel comfortable in, I got the APress book TechnoBear mentioned and went through the various examples in it while trying to make advertising banners for the company I was working for. It took me about a month of all-day playing with things and occasionally looking up stuff on the Gimp forums (which are pretty good) when I couldn’t find something, to feel comfortable with it. I did not start with any other program beforehand, which I think helped (unless you count Microsoft Paint from Windows 3.11x : ). People who start in Photoshop tend to have trouble with the Gimp due to the different interfaces. The tools, on the other hand, are mostly similar. Once I felt familiar with and confident with the Gimp, I could generally (except when certain filters were needed) follow a Photoshop tutorial and do the same thing with the Gimp.
As for Inkscape, there were excellent tutorials back when I looked, but they were all made by a French guy and he had to keep updating them as Inkscape updated… being in beta, each new incremented version could do so much more than the previous version… last time I used Inkscape it was version 0.43 or 0.45. Notice the lack of a 1 in front of it. It’s also very keyboard-enabled, which is quite nice.
I did not have previous experience myself, though I was of course already familiar with my Desktop Environment for Linux, which does have a bit of effect on how the Gimp works (specifically, the Alt key). I have little knowledge of graphic design, just basic colour theory and Rule of Thirds kinda crap. The learning curve with Gimp is the interface, and if you’re not used to graphics tools, then as Mitică said, the tools. Most of the time the tools are the same or very similar between interfaces. That is, the Bezier tool does the same thing in Gimp as it does everywhere else, but maybe different keystrokes work or the options are under a different panel. No biggie.
For Inkscape, the learning curve was too much for me, and that wasn’t a learning curve of Inkscape itself, but rather, vectors. I just don’t think that way. I grew up drawing on paper and to me, pixels fit my mindset better: where I drew the line is where it stays, and Flash’s constant “correction” of my lines was a big frustration for me (this is both something vectors do and also Flash moves lines to improve file size).
Like you I’m a book person. Or at least, I tend to need to get started on a book before moving on to individual tutorials online. The APress book of the Gimp was pretty good, though I guess by now you’d want it to reflect the current Gimp version and if you want to do animations, there’s now the GAP which probably needs its very own tutorial/book.
I won the Book of Inkscape (third or fourth down from the list of Inkscape books Mitică posted) in a Perl Conference raffle and while I hadn’t gotten back to doing a project in Inkscape afterwards, I looked through it and searched some things it of course the author had great understanding of Inkscape, as Dimitri is/was one of the developers 
No. While I don’t do well with video tutorials, if you do better with teachers then the Lydia ones or others mentioned might be useful to you. Also kids everywhere like showing how they did “x” on Youtube, so I’m sure there are lots of (bad and good) tuts online there. The Gimp forum would be a good place to search for questions or, having exhausted that, posting your own.
7-8. Luckily I could just sit at work and learn it. It does make a big difference, or did to me: everything I was paid to learn at work where I could just sit behind the computer and DO was well-learned: html, css, etc as well.
I chose my user name for good reason.
For me, it was what could I afford? Abode products also simply don’t run on my OS. Adobe hates my OS. Took them years too long to make a Flash Player that actually worked on it. So I had Gimp so I learned it.
Pick one software and spend all your learning time on that one. Maybe also choose just vector or just raster: the two are so different, I don’t see how it could be easy to learn both at the same time (plus this means learning two interfaces of two softwares…). If you are not going to be a professional graphic designer for large brand-name companies, I don’t think you can go wrong choosing between open source and Adobe products: at their base they really all can do the same stuff, and the differences can be worked out. Adobe stuff is made for Windows and Mac though and one Adobe program has no trouble opening other Adobe programs, and this might be a plus if you’re working with other people’s files. Also, I’ve used Gimp on Windows and the experience seemed… less, somehow. The keyboard worked differently and how Windows made screenshots worked differently and the issue with empty RGB headers showed differently on the Windows monitors… so.
A lot of times you just want to be able to do one effect. Places like here and [url=http://garmahis.com/tutorials/gimp-tutorials/]here show you how. Like HTML/CSS/etc tutorials, these are of little use when you are still very unfamiliar with the software. Leave these how-to’s for after you know where the buttons and dialogues are, because only after you are familiar with these, you can see what the tutorial means and it’s not hard to just do it.
But it burns so, and makes biking much much slower
Yup. The more time you can focus on using the software, the more familiar you get with where tools are and how they work and what they can do.
Everyone’s speed is different, but yes, it can take this long. It might also matter if you did artsy fartsy stuff before you started in on software. I could always draw pretty well with a mouse even when all I had was MSPaint. I would prolly be b*tchin good if I had a tablet.
Yup. And as a mediocre user at best, I am always amazed at the things people can do with graphics software. You can find brilliant stuff done in, yes, MSPaint. And the Gimp people can always match something Adobe people roll out, when they get into their graphics wars.
Just assume forever and then anything faster is gold
There are tutorials galore for individual things like buttons and stuff. But as I and others have said here, be familiar and comfortable with the interface of your software before doing many of these one-off tutorials. Some are well-explained for the n00bs but others assume you know what the “such and such” tool is. That is, some say
“Open the such and such tool and select Foo. Now make a selection around the subject and mask it with an overlay and cut. Use the Baz tool to add texture Y. And that’s it!”
Such a tutorial is fine when you already know your software and just want ideas of the steps to do something specific, but if you are new to the software it is simply frustrating. Avoid it for now.
If you think you already have a feel for vectors, you could just try Inkscape. Which, btw, has a nice tutorial built in. And you can edit the tutorial itself, so it’s an interactive tutorial, very nice. Like the built-in vim tutorial. You learn by doing and you remember by doing over and over, so this is nice.
If you’re already used to thinking in pixels, Gimp is mostly raster (fonts and paths and fills being exceptions of course) and maybe you would learn to do simple things in it quicker than a vector program.
I would think you’d want some proficiency with one before starting in on another. And besides, while you can create vectors for the web (and may do), you’re ultimately saving them as pixels (png, gif, jpg) unless you’re doing SVG on your web pages. So it might make more sense to start with pixels and end with pixels, but it ultimately depends on you.
All designers I have ever worked with use either Photoshop and/or Illustrator. Inkscape and gimp are not professional grade software. That said, the software has very little to do with being an effective designer. Most top end design schools don’t even teach software like RISD. That should be a good indicator as to how important it really is in comparison to basic design fundamentals learned in traditional mediums. I went to SCAD myself and had one single class focused on technical aspects of Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. After that it was all self learning though solving actual design problems. Software proficiency is like 10% of creating well done design work. Software tends to be what the technical people focus on who are making a transition to design which is completely wrong. That is focusing on Dreamweaver to learn to build websites – no different.
I keep hearing DreamWeaver is the popular tool in web design school. I’ve never heard of any place teaching vim or emacs. Are they not professional tools?
I was referring to graphic design degree not web design. I don’t even think any reputable schools offer a web design degree. vim and emacs are for programming and designers aren’t programmers. Just as programmers aren’t designers no matter how much they would like to be. It happens on both ends though programmers learning enough software to provide *design services and designers learning enough *programming to provide those services. Seems to be the name of the game with freelancers though companies *normally have a clear separation between those responsibilities. It all comes down to not wanting to pay someone else so putting out work that is “good enough” on both ends. I do tend to think though that graphic design programs that offer one or two electives in web give students a false impression that they can build web sites when reality is all technical aspects learned are useless.
Stomme poes,
Awesome reply in #31!!! :tup:
Off Topic:
It seems like for some time in the past you were stressed or angry or something because you sorta clammed up for a while. Glad to see you are back to your old chatty, gushing self!! 
Well, maybe GIMP and Inkscape have “grown up” some in the past year or so.
Maybe when I get Release #2 done in the next month, I can take a more serious look at these tools, as I definitely need them in my toolbelt!
Thanks,
Debbie
- Inkscape is still in beta (and will be for a very, very long time it seems).
- Gimp still lacks necessary print tools (and someone getting a degree in graphic design is very likely to need to do print).
Those are the only good arguments I could accept for “these are not professional tools.” However what schools choose to use or teach seems based entirely on popularity and I’m not one to conflate popularity with “professional”. Which is why I brought up DreamWeaver. It’s popular. It’s not a professional tool. Professionals however can do just fine using DreamWeaver (look at Paul O’Brien). Does what schools choose make something a professional tool? Is it a professional tool if professionals are using it? If professionals are using Inkscape over Illustrator then what does that make it? Non-professional because it’s not in school? Does this make Windows a professional operating system but Linux is hobby software? Most professionals use enterprise software, does that mean non-enterprise software is not professional? (semi-serious questions I guess… I’m not a professional or even hobby graphic designer so I don’t really know.)
Excuse my skepticism, it’s just that I’ve been hearing my whole non-professional life that none of my tools are professional. I kinda start tuning it out after a while. Though that doesn’t mean it’s not true; I am not a professional.
Which leads into my next, off-topic point actually.
[ot]
According to Some Guy On Twitter, I’m a cowboy and a wanna-be web developer. The fact that I am still not re-employed yet doesn’t tell me there’s a problem with the market or the economy or anything like that. It tells me I am not a professional, and I do not offer what people want or need. I don’t use professional tools, I don’t write professional code, and I can come here to forums like SitePoint and blather my opinion about anything whether I have any experience or knowledge of it wherever I want and nobody knows you’re a dog on teh interwebs. Some people confuse my word diarrhea with knowledge, though I think most people know I’m just blowing stuff outta my ass. You have to take everything I say with a bag of salt and realise that maybe I’m making more word soup on forums because I have plenty of time on my hands doing nothing else anyways.[/ot]
[ot]
All that tells you the “Guy on Twitter” cannot see past the end of their nose. Many “commercial” web developers are a waste of space anyway with regard to the slop they produce (that is lapped up by the fools). There is a clear distinction between; ‘professional’ and ‘commercial’ - I am certainly not the latter. 
Having the commercial programs like DW or PS does not make you a professional so obviously they certainly must have a major misunderstanding of what professional coder means. A professional coder needs no tools; they think code they can write markup and stylesheets blindfold (well on paper with pencil) far better than any program.
Why are the schools using Adobe products? It is because they have been marketed at them and they tend to be de facto. I cannot believe anybody seriously [with any common sense or more than one braincell] would use Dreamweaver to write HTML in Design view.[/ot]
The biggest problem lies with the people who hire web designers. Most of the time, these people are corporate employees who know next to nothing about web design, a reason why you see so many job ads with Photoshop and Illustrator skills written down as a “skill” requirement. These people go with the trend, with whatever they caught up somewhere on the net. For the same reason, you’ll now see job ads that state you must know every Framework on the planet in order to apply for a job. It’s utter nonsense, obviously, but if people who haven’t a clue continue to be responsible for posting skill requirements, then that’s what they’ll get, Hamburgers and fries…
Off Topic:
At least you’ll stay well employed! 
(PS—I’m not referring to the quality of your work, but that fact that you … ahem … live in … Hamburg. Right … bad joke, I know. Shame on me. [Slinks off guiltily …]
I am a DEVELOPER and quite far from [legitimately] calling myself a Designer. But Photoshop is very difficult for me because it seems to “think” in a way that is counter to the way I do.
Perhaps it carries a legacy from the traditional print industry and ‘designers’ understand a certain workflow. For me, I always seem to be struggling with it; just locating the right button, menu, tool to do what I know I want out of it.
Of course, the majority of tasks I need from a graphics application for web development are very simple:
[LIST][]Cropping
[]Resizing (physical size and/or resolution)
[]Adjusting color
[]Adding Text
[/LIST]