My only professional encounter with creating graphics happened in Draw Something. Even so, I signed up for Antonín Pospíšil’s workshop held under the Medio Akademie banner, where I also teach. I like broadening my horizons and letting myself be surprised by where my professional path takes me as a result.

How did Tonda handle the role of instructor?

Over the course of the whole day he touched on just about every topic related to producing web graphics on commission. From communicating with the client and clarifying the brief (how to ensure both sides are happy), through the psychology of color, accessibility, UX, the technical specifics of building websites such as optimizing exported images and choosing the right format for a given situation, all the way to practical tips for working efficiently in Photoshop and collaborating with a coder. Tonda also mentioned responsive web design and pointed out that while today it may be enough to prepare a design in a single (desktop) layout, in the near future that will definitely no longer be sufficient given the growing share of mobile devices.

The whole workshop was interspersed with links to plenty of additional web-based and book resources for further study. Anyone who doesn’t keep educating themselves and trying to improve is not a good choice for their client. And that holds true in every field.

Tonda is a very quick-witted instructor and, beyond his prepared links, he was able to back up every question he answered by finding a relevant article or tool. He devoted part of the workshop to the topic of web fonts as well.

The workshop helped me clarify that graphic design isn’t random but a fairly exact process. For one specific brief there definitely aren’t infinitely many solutions, but rather a few variants that differ in small details. I can recommend it to any beginning graphic designer, but also to people switching over from a similar yet still distant field. In this session most people came from a DTP background.

Unfortunately I don’t possess even a shred of artistic creativity, but yesterday finally tempted me to start reading Design for Hackers, a book I had picked up some time ago.