It’s official! Deke’s Techniques, the weekly video tutorial series of creative Photoshop and Illustrator projects in 10 minutes or less is a hit! We started publishing these weekly tutorials in January, and our members are loving this new format. While we will continue to publish the longer form courses that we are known for, we are ready to start expanding the weekly format to other subject areas—and that’s where you come in. Would you please tell us which of these weekly series you think we should add by taking the two polls below?
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Tags: Deke's Techniques, Illustrator, Photoshop
The above are all great but a weekly series should be based on things that are constantly changing. Sounds like a natural for all things social media.
BTW – I feel sorry for the FB/Twitter instructor. She’s done one of the best titles ever, but she’s been trying to update it since, when, last summer? The services change so quickly she has no chance
But with a weekly series … And you could use lots of instructors doing updates for YouTube, Word, LinkedIn, etc., as they all change.
I hate to disagree with DB, but I do. First of all, one of the reasons that Deke’s Techniques has been such a successful series is that there is an almost infinite number of things that can be done with the powerful software he is demonstrating – Photoshop and Illustrator. Facebook and Twitter are fascinating sites/webapps, as is YouTube — but I don’t see them as being used to “create” content the way the Adobe software does, but rather to “deliver” content that is created.
Secondly, Deke’s series isn’t really about the software’s new features, but about the new things that can be produced out of the existing features. New features could just be listed in a topical blogpost. That is why a similar series to Deke’s Techniques with something like JavaScript, CSS or jQuery (or even Flash CS5, which wasn’t listed), focusing on creative new uses of the languages or the framework, would, IMHO, be great.
I like web interactivity …. so i wish to lynda.com focus more on css
thanks lynda.com
I would like a series on how to create Android apps.
I would love to see a course, maybe not a weekly course as Deke is doing but an actual course with full content on Basics of Graphic Design.
See if you can get Andrew Kramer from VideoCopilot.net to do some training videos. He’s pretty good at it.
One suggestion – I’d like to see some kind of testing with your video series – multiple choice quizes could help point out sections that need to be repeated.
I think a weekly series of how to extend Facebook would be great. How can I add new pages, how can I generate “automatic” content by using RSS feed services (like twitterfeed, …), how do I integrate pages of my homepage to facebook, how can I develop additions, how … There are lot’s of interesting “how do I”s
I am getting so much more use out of the software that has been sitting on my computer for decades now that I have found you. I can sit and learn all day long if I have the time.
But now that I am getting better with the microsoft and adobe products there is one area that you have only one course for and that is music production.
I would like to see you expand into a whole new section with music at its core. There are programs out there like ‘finale’ that have a whole range of learning experiences and a whole range of buying options. If you could help people learn to use music the way you have with photography, I think there would be a lot of grateful consumers out there.
More than just a thought, maybe you’re first plea.
That’s what I’d like to see for additional courses, not just “how to” but “how BEST to”. For instance, there are so many great courses on lynda.com, Photoshop especially, but mostly it’s all about how to do this or that, or what the software can do plus here are the new version features. I’d like to see one course that shows how to best use these tools. If I have an image that has excessive shadows on the person’s face, I know that Levels or Curves plus some kind of Mask is necessary, but how do I USE these tools most effectively? In other words, what goes through a pro’s mind when they see a need for an edit? I don’t expect to be made a pro from a course like that, but over-the-shoulder apprenticeship is a fantastic way to get GOOD. This is how surgeons and watchmakers and piano tuners and artists are mentored. Ah, there’s the brand: the Lynda.com Mentoring Series. The course assumes you know how to run the specific software, it will focus on making the student think like a pro. And PLEASE, if you do something like this for Photoshop, tell the instructor to just instruct us to flatten the layers, expecting we know how. If I hear “that’s Control Shift on a PC , Command Shift on a Mac” one more time I might go batty.
I voted for JavaScript first and CSS second because the need for JS is increasing at an exponential rate. On a personal note, I’d like to see more object-oriented programming classes on lynda.com…perhaps a weekly tutorial series on that.
That being said, I find lynda.com to be my A-number-one learning resource right now. It has saved me more times than I can count and am grateful for it’s existence.
Keep on doing what you do!
-k
I’m with #Kaidez, more of the programming languages, I had to go to VTC to get some Visual Basic instruction not long back.
I’m trying to learn flash at present and have watched numerous video’s and still don’t know a lot about it, whereas if you had something like the Tuts+ PhotoShop basics video series in Flash then I’m sure I’d be kicking goals.
Unfortunately I’m time poor like most so all I want is enough information to get the job done, make the video’s to the point and don’t stretch them over many.
Have a look at this video on layers, perfect. http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/photoshop-layers/
http://psd.tutsplus.com/sessions/photoshop-basix/
A tutorial that has come to mind is raster/custom mapping for a Garmin Oregon.
I don’t have a GPS but will probably get a Oregon 550 and start making maps. I’m not sure what the most affective way to create maps is but I’ve taken a load of screen-shots of Google Maps with high enough magnification to see the street names within a town and stitched them together with PhotoShop, just need to calibrate the maps in Google Earth.
I agree with Paul. A mentoring Series on Photoshop and Lightroom would be my first choice for a new series. I also agree with Paul’s point about the shortcuts.
I am a manger looking for resources to help existing staff develop content for social media and would welcome “what works best” training. Eventually I may be able to hire specialist, but at present I am limited to savvy staff with primary expertise in the content (Health) rather than than with rapidly evolving methods of disseminating a targeted, audience appropriate message .
@DB and AJK I actually agree with both of you, but think that what the two of you proposed are two different things. The “weekly tutorial series”, at least by how we’ve defined it, is meant to be a collection of short projects that can be accomplished in 10 minutes or less. Think of it as something you can do when you want a short break from work, are bored, during lunch, etc. A constructive alternative to blowing 10 minutes on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter… The goal is to get you into a rhythm of bite-size learning when you don’t have the time or the energy to commit to a longer form course, but still want to keep learning between your longer educational goals.
I think DB’s suggestion of weekly updates on social media services is valid too, but imagine that to be more of a traditional blog format with the occasional video showing what’s new when simple text isn’t enough. In other words, that would be more about informing about what’s changed rather than “mini-projects”.
And yes DB, as software continues to evolve from traditional “desktop” apps that upgrade every 18 to 24 months into services that are constantly updated, lynda.com will have to adapt our production process to keep up too. For example, Anne Marie is scheduled to come to our studios to record a complete redo of the Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter course very soon. But after that, the idea is that she’ll record updates from home as needed to keep the course current.
@Gulzar Graphic: “Web interactivity” has always been and will continue to be a key focus for us. We have several new courses on CSS already in production that you’ll see published soon, with many more in the works for the rest of the year. In the meantime, be sure to check out the CSS3 First Look and Web Fonts First Look courses we published recently. They provide solid overviews of what is new with those rapidly evolving standards. And judging from the poll results so far, there is a lot of interest in a weekly mini-projects series on CSS…
@BLW: Several courses are in production already on how to develop Android applications. There are currently at least two options to develop apps for the Android platform — “native” and Flash. Native Android apps are based on Java, which on its own has been a long standing request for us to provide courses on. I’m very excited that you’ll see us make traction on Java this year. If you are already a Flash developer, we published our first course just last week on how to start using Flash to develop for Android. It’s called Flash Professional CS5: Creating a Simple Game for Android Devices by author Paul Trani.
@Word Gems: Yes, a “Foundations of Design” series would be awesome, teaching concepts on color, composition, hierarchy, typography, etc. Thank you for the suggestion. We do have an interesting series by author and designer Nigel French in the library already, called the “Designing a…” series. While it is tool specific (mostly InDesign and some Illustrator), he does weave in a lot of core design concepts within each course while teaching how to design a logo, business card, poster, brochure, magazine spread, newsletter and book cover.
I would LOVE to see weekly SEO tips.
I also really like the above idea of FB/Twitter (& other social media) weekly tutorials (esp since they are so dynamic).
thanks for listening
Wow my ears were burning! (I’m the Facebook/Twitter Marketing author that DB mentioned — thanks for the vote! And Hans, those are great ideas!). Good news is, I’m updating the course at lynda.com in a few short weeks. I agree though that it’s a natural for weekly tips vids, or at least, more frequent updating. I’m so glad we waited till after the major Pages overhaul though! (on 2/11/11).
AM
I’d like to see weekly short topics on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. I’m trying to learn how to make games with HTML5 and some things really stump me. Like a deck of cards. How do I set up a deck of cards and play them in the window? And music? How can I layer music, playing three or more different audio files at once and synch them up to the beat? Or midi? How can I use midi in HTML5? None of these warrant a large tutorial, but a weekly short lesson would be ideal.
I would like a short series on wacom tablets. I know there are some segments in some of the courses on this, but they are insufficient and not pulled together coherently.
Deke’s Techniques is amazing because Deke presents his lessons with a healthy mix of passion and presentation. Deke knows how to teach. If Ian Robinson is teaching the “Motion In Minutes” then I think that would also be successful. I also like what James Williamson has been doing with his First Looks series.
“I voted for JavaScript first and CSS second because the need for JS is increasing at an exponential rate. On a personal note, I’d like to see more object-oriented programming classes on lynda.com…perhaps a weekly tutorial series on that.”
No offense, but why do you need Javascript at an exponential rate? With HTML5 and CSS3, the need for Javascript has gone vastly downhill, Javascript is usually a terrible, terrible thing, unless you just love XSS attacks on your website. Thank God the new selector classes in CSS3 are getting rid of the need for that awful language. Same with animation effects, those are also being replaced by CSS3. Maybe javascript is necessary for backwards compatibility or designing websites for clients that are overseas in less industrialized nations, but I don’t know of any real reason to use javascript. Hell, even Adobe abandoned it when they made Actionscript 3. Rounded corners, gradients without using a background photo, etc. are also all in CSS3.
Case-in-point is facebook, they now use javascript for their photos to use a lightbox effect. Only like four years late on that technique. But, it sucks, terribly. They put the buttons right next to where it is to scroll, so one wrong click by a millimeter and you lost the picture, and it doesn’t remember what you were doing before that, so you get to start all over again. No thanks for that.
If they were going to do a series on Javascript, I imagine it would be on Prototype, Scriptalicious, Jquery, YUI, and most of the libraries that use javascript rather than the language itself. The reason those libraries were invented was to deal with OOP, reusable classes, and all the barrage of debugging errors that javascript is notorious for. Javascript has become so notoriously bad that one of the most popular extensions on Firefox is noscript, which blocks Javascript. You might blame spammers that think pop-up ads and alert boxes are cool for the problems, but the problems run deeper. People think that validating their forms with just javascript will keep their forms safe, then get hacked and wonder why. A webpage without any javascript would be a mighty fine webpage even if there was nothing else on it.
I would love to see more tutorials in creating websites with JQuery with PHP and MySQL, more php tutorials (teaching multiple file uploading, advanced while looping, Shopping cart, forums,etc).
You guys rock!!!
-Winton
We choose our courses on lynda.com and do our best to follow, but there are always questions; questions I would like to be able to ask the person who designed the course, and who could answer straight away. At the moment this is not possible, and so I’m stuck with searching other sites and fora (forums).
What would be great, would be a “return visit” by each presenter, in the form of a video tutorial, to answer a collection of questions that we can all send in to lynda.com after taking the course. A quick look at the questions would show the type of thing that people need to know/still don’t understand, and as well as offering a second chance for us to learn, it would give good feedback to the presenter on how well s/he did the first time around.
What do you think?
@denisw: We do actually have two mechanisms to submit a question to the author of a course.
Option 1 is to choose “Contact Us” from the Support menu at the top of every page. On the resulting form, choose “Content Questions” from the Department pop-up menu. Questions get routed to our Tech Support team. If the question has already been asked and answered before, you’ll get a speedy reply from them. If it is a new question that they are not able to answer for you, it will get sent to the author.
Option 2 is to check the FAQs tab on the course details page for the course you have a question about. The default tab is the “table of contents”. Click on FAQs to see if any questions and answers have been added there since the course was published. You can also submit a new question right from that page as well.
Receiving this kind of feedback from our members helps us fix mistakes and/or lets us know if something has changed since the course was published. When needed, we do things lie add overlays to a video, ask the author to record a new video, etc.
And yes, we read and respond to every tech support question submitted.
I agree with Word Gems – it would be so valuable to have Basics of Graphic Design.
Michael said “No offense, but why do you need Javascript at an exponential rate? With HTML5 and CSS3, the need for Javascript has gone vastly downhill, Javascript is usually a terrible, terrible thing, unless you just love XSS attacks on your website.”
Okay then, how would _you_ make a deck of cards without javascript? I thought the shuffling, dealing, assigning values, figuring out conflicts and results (think Munchkin here, something more dynamic than poker), not to mention storing the results and handling on-line multiplayer as well as computer opponents, could only be done using javascript. If it can all be done with HTML5 and CSS3 then I’m all for it! But I don’t see how to do it. How would you handle it?
Hmm… I disagree re: providing a “Basics of Graphic Design” course. There are tons of other sources and ways to learn about graphic design.
I’d rather lynda.com keep the focus on designer-friendly software training… this is the only place it exists. Just my 2 cents.
“And PLEASE, if you do something like this for Photoshop, tell the instructor to just instruct us to flatten the layers, expecting we know how. If I hear “that’s Control Shift on a PC , Command Shift on a Mac” one more time I might go batty.”
Agree. I find it distracting when the person says this.
To me, the keyboard shortcut and the action being demonstrated are two different things. My brain “absorbs” them separately.
First I like to focus completely on the thing being shown: see it in action, try it out, determine if it’s useful to me, etc.
If so, then (and only then) does it make sense to note the KBSC.
Not to mention the fact that for every viewer of the vid, 50% of that announcement is useless.
Maybe it could be added (in text, like a caption) to the vid for a few seconds near the time when the instructor would have said it?
THANKS for reading this!
I’d love to see an updated how-to on creating an html email newsletter. The one on lynda.com is from 2006. Thanks.
I would like a series focusing on Video techniques. Not the software, but rather the tips and techniques of filming, using HD cameras and SLR video. It is a rich and almost overwhelming field for the beginners and a rapidly growing area.
Whereas software titles are plentiful and always changing, a series for how to shoot videos effectively would be the perfect adjunct to the software skills. If you don’t capture good footage and sound – all the software skills in the world will not be enough to satisfy expected results and encourage further efforts.
I think it could be a foundation course for many, many courses already in place.
@Paul (and @Fred) At the opposite end of the Deke spectrum are his comprehensive multi-part One-on-One titles, which show you how to approach a project “as if you were looking over Deke’s shoulder” (or he were looking over yours). Although the knowledge in the One-on-One series is fairly encyclopedic, the instruction nonetheless centers around learning tools in the context of trying to create something great or fix something awful. And the idea is that you’re sitting with a Photoshop (or Illustrator) mentor in a “one-on-one” situation.
Meanwhile, I hope you’re finding that Deke’s Techniques takes you along for the ride without a lot of extraneous explanation, relying on the fact that we’ve got a whole library full of other approaches and background information for those who are inspired but need to get their bearings.
and @HB too, I appreciate the feedback on keyboard shortcuts. My first reaction is like @HB’s, show me first and then I’ll decide if I want to make room in my brain to log the shortcut as well. But I also notice that they’ve insidiously crept into my fingers when I wasn’t intending, just in time to make my work more efficient. It’s a nuanced call, you don’t want to distract beginners and you don’t want to bore advanced users, but ultimately keyboard shortcuts are useful and learning them in context makes sense.
Appreciate the feedback all around!
Michael Ninness said:
February 21, 2011 at 9:14 am : We do actually have two mechanisms to submit a question to the author of a course.
Thanks for this information, Michael, and I shall follow your guidelines (in the comments above) to see what I can find out. A recent request that I sent this way [214-14E21427-E4CC] didn’t provide too much help, but I’ll keep trying
)
Regards,
denisw
More on designing and publishing mobile apps for all devices and HTML5 (video) would have been a nice choice.
Bring Bert Monroy back! Would be great to have a weekly series on a real-world project or something that is big — that is not about learning an app but applying it in the real world.
I would like more about making use of wordpress, especially designing and maintaining a photoblog. I also find useful the various photoretouching courses and lightroom courses which have greatly enhanced my images and printing techniques. Unfortunately, they do not go far enough.
I would like to see more courses on Dreamweaver. I’m new at developing my husband’s hunting website and can use all the help I can get!
I want to see SolidWorks tutorials.
Would love to see more DSLR camera tips from Ben Long
I love the new photography courses that you are offering not to mention the photoshop and lightroom video’s. What I would really love to see is courses on using camera’s like my new Canon 7D and especially the HD video features. I saw an article last week about a movie that was filmed by an amateur filmmaker using only Canon 7D camera’s that was purchased by Paramount Pictures for 4 Million dollars.
Also Natasha Bedingfield, the British pop star, had her music video “Touch” shot entirely with Canon 7D camera’s.
This is new technology that is taking HD video by storm in this country and Europe. It seems to me that lynda.com should get in on the ground floor teaching and guiding new filmmakers in their creative endeavors.
Michael
Productivity techniques. e.g. managing collections of files, managing content, productivity tips and tricks, tagging for local and web search engines, etc.
I’m so grateful for your website! I’m doing so much more with my software as a result of watching your tutorials. I offer the following “wish list” for lynda.com:
1. I’d like to see more “best practice” tutorials. I really like “Deke’s Techniques” because it models a good way to achieve an effect… as Paul’s comment calls it: “over-the-shoulder apprenticeship.”
2. I’ve created a lot of art, by hand and by computer, but I’m still struggling with my website management. I’ve used a variety of programs and currently have Dreamweaver. I agree with Becky’s comment because I “over-the-shoulder apprenticeship”
I agree with WordGem. I think a basics course in graphic design would be an invaluable tool across the board.
last sentence in my comment (March 8, 2011 at 1:32pm) should read: I agree with Becky’s comment because I “can use all the help I can get!” Thanks.
@chris: We love Bert too! And he’s coming back very soon to the Online Training Library. We are putting the final editing touches on a 3-part series he recently recorded called “The Making of Times Square”. An epic insight into the creation of his epic 4-year, 750,000 Photoshop layers, 25 foot digital painting. And yes, how cool would it be to have Bert doing a weekly episode like Deke’s Techniques? Maybe the “Pixel Pusher” series? Bert, you reading this?
@nanderton: We agree. We’d like to see pretty much anything Ben Long would like to record with us! An amazing teacher. We do have a few more courses planned with him to be published later this year. As you can imagine, courses like the Exposure and Lenses courses are a lot of work and take longer to plan and produce. Until then, we have a ton more core photography courses coming your way in the near future with some other amazing authors.
Most tutorials in Photoshop tend to apply to uses with photography. I would like to see Photoshop taught for illustrators for a change, or demonstrations of illustration techniques. Also, a tutorial for the Wacom tablet would be nice. I have one but have not felt confident with the technical aspect of it to make the switch.