ILP for participation

As a prerequisite for my “History of Illustrated Texts” course here at FSU , I am asked to display proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud. Seeing as I’m new to the application, I thought it would be a great idea to catalogue my time with the Lynda.com introductory course. For the uninitiated, Adobe creative is a collection of software offered by Adobe, spanning from the creative suite to the base word processor.

Right off the bat, the features that solidify Lynda for me are the offline and transcript functionalities that all but ensure my experience remains seamless. It’s nitpicky, sure, but a great quality of life feature that many of these “how-to” video series sorely lack; seeing as they don’t cater to different learning speeds.

The course is divided into 6 chapters with a supplementary 7^th detailing the functions of a mobile app. Chapters 1-3 delve into the UI interface—save types, user permits, creative web files, and so forth--and social functionalities that ensure your projects get shared correctly. These initial set of videos are expansive, covering the important elements that can save your life later on when your attempting to create full scale posters and brochures.   

The pertinent materials, as they pertain to my project, pop up around the 4^th chapter. This chapter covers photoshop and illustrator and how best to go about utilizing the windows cc library. My English project asks me to design a poster centered around the subject of animals. It could be a recreation of an important historical event reimagined by injecting anthropomorphic mice, or a brief graphic novel centered around a band of penguins. I’ve decided to recreate an illustrative depiction of a specific raid that had occurred during the Vietnam war. The illustrations would include anthropomorphic mice as the Vietcong, scattering to their mounds to avoid being devoured by hovering American helicopters, portrayed by vicious falcons.

You can imagine the amount of photoshop assets required to bring the image to life; in truth I need an entire album. This step was simplified by the easy to discern 5^th chapter dealing with the type kit and adobe stock functionality. Filtering through the copious amounts of stock photos is made easy thanks to an intuitive search engine.

I have a few qualms with the over all implementation of materials on the course. The narrator, instructor Chad Chelius, spends too long  on the behind the scenes technical stuff and not nearly enough on the tools and implementations thereof. After laying out the information, Chelius launches into a couple of projects; one a poster for an outdoor recreational activity and another was a conventional piece of vector art. Both went by fast, and Chelius failed to utilize many of the complex applications to great effect, leaving me to supplicate elsewhere on the net.

Overall, I was impressed by the amount of information was presented for free ( assuming you are an FSU student) and also presented articulately and saliently as this was. I was left to my own devices with regards to a number of complicated layering elements, but regardless, this course was definitely worth my time.