FantasymasterVery nice indeed. your style is more simplistic than hers:http://www.planetminecraft.com/member/lolturdferguson/, but that makes it look all the more professional. Great Work!
That's true, not to sound too commercial but you work to the market you're in. Her stuff is great around the gaming circles, my stuff is more clean and simple because the corporate market is what i'm used to designing for in my day-job.
Fantasymasterquestion: what program(s) do you use? I am currently messing around with Gimp and Blender, but it's not really working too well.
Good ol' Blender, I started off using it; wow it would have been at least a decade ago now. Great program though like any 3d program the learning curve is somewhat steep. Fortunately there's a lot more resources out there then when I started out with it. Currently I'm all about the Adobe Suite. Photoshop for all the design work, Premiere and After Effects for the video work, Dreamweaver for web work, and Flash for video game dev. It's got the whole kit right there and you can swap all the different files around quite easily between programs. Adobe have made their CS2 suite available for free on their website now, while they haven't really promoted it they did go ahead and make it available on there website. I don't encourage downloading via torrents or anything like that, but since it's Adobe themselves making it available on their own website, take the time, check it out. There's great resources available to learn from.
Fantasymasteranother question: how do you come up with those shapes (especially the 13th from the top)?
If you're talking about the symbol, it's just layering. The one shape is created, then duplicated and then different tones and opacity values and they're offset. The orange things are made from a technique involving creating a brush in Photoshop that is designed to respond to a graphics tablet pen, and then using a few functions to make it simulate a pen along a path to get it to curve around and taper on the ends.
Fantasymasterany tips for someone to become a graphic artist/designer?
It's a large industry, and it's an easy industry to get into. Going into it though try and find what you do best at, but more then that find what you enjoy doing the most. If you're enthusiastic and enjoy what you do you'll push yourself to excel and learn more.
Again there's more resources online then ever before, watch videos on youtube, check out sites like
http://tutsplus.com/ that offer tutorials and courses online. Play around with the software, experiment. Push yourself to design posters or logos if that's the direction you want to go.
What I would do is create wallpapers just for fun, try out new techniques. I have folders and folders of ones I created. Keep the original gimp or psd files so you can go back and see how you pieced them together.
If you plan to move into doing graphic design as a job freelancing, I suggest finding someone who you can ask about being what's called a Sole Trader here in Aus, basically being self employed. There's a few registrations and documents you need to maintain mattering where you live so just be aware of that before you kick down that road.
But it's great fun, it's a great outlet of creativity. But you'll only ever be as good as you make yourself. Anyone can push themselves to go far, but it's not just about ability or technique, develop that eye. Check out sites like
http://www.digitalartserved.com/ or
http://www.brandingserved.com/ to see what's trending at the moment, or to get inspiration. Try to unravel how they created what they did, the layers.
Just make sure you enjoy it, and think outside of the box.
