Adobe Continuing Education Classes
Skills to Design Glitzy Publications, Create Logos & Improve Photos
Community colleges offer practical, low-cost computer training courses that teach in-demand software application skills for people at all levels.
An excellent example of community college learning is Introduction to Digital Publishing (Windows or Macintosh), a course at George Brown College. Hands-on computer training covers the principal features of Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.
The night school course costs $168 (Canadian currency). Over 7 weeks, students meet in a weekly computer laboratory for a 3-hour class. While Adobe and many third-party providers offer online training in digital applications, community college classes enable students to quickly learn the shortcuts, pitfalls and most useful features of the software.
An experienced instructor, who makes a living using Adobe applications, leads the course. Each class starts with a demo of the software projected on a large screen at the front of the computer lab. The demo is followed up with practice exercises that enable students to reinforce those skills at their own computer stations.
Learners design a magazine cover, a work project that requires as much planning as Adobe software skills. Below is a summary of skills that students apply while creating their magazine covers.
Adobe Illustrator Classes
Graphic designers use Illustrator to create logos and other graphics for print, video, the Web and mobile devices.
Students learn how to:
- Create a new document by first defining the artboard’s size to match the height and width of the illustration (e.g. a logo).
- Use the Navigator to magnify the artboard size on screen while positioning the artboard at the screen’s center.
- Work with Illustrator tools to create the text and graphic elements of a logo by separating them into different layers.
- Use tear-off menus to draw fairly complex objects like a starburst.
The instructor gives a 51-step assignment to reinforce these and many more Illustrator skills.
Adobe Photoshop Classes
Photoshop is the application of choice for making mediocre pictures look great.
The class learned to use the:
- Magic Wand tool to change the colors of a photo's background and images.
- Lasso tool to delete objects from a photo.
- Extract under the Filter menu to make the background behind an object transparent.
Adobe InDesign Classes
Digital publishers use InDesign to create brochures, books and other documents with lots of text and images.
Highlights from the InDesign lessons include learning how to:
- Place separate source image and text files from other applications into distinct, presized frames with the Rectangle Frame tool.
- Create text styles.
- Flow text to multiple frames.
The instructor prefers Adobe InDesign over QuarkXPress, mainly because InDesign costs less and is part of the Adobe software family.
Other Adobe Training Courses
Key to learning Adobe software is the fact that Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign share many of the same menus, palettes, shortcuts and tools. Thus, an experienced Illustrator user requires much less time to learn Adobe InDesign. For example, the Window menu accesses the palettes in all Adobe publishing applications. In addition, layering works the same in all Adobe digital publishing applications.
After completing Introduction to Digital Publishing, students are in a much stronger position to select the most useful courses and design their own night school programs. Intermediate and advanced night school classes in intermediate and advanced Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop are available. Also available are courses in Adobe Acrobat and Pagemaker.
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