Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies (2015)

Part III. Getting Your Education

Chapter 14. Knowing Web Graphics Tools

In This Chapter

Discovering key tools for web graphics

Exploring Photoshop and GIMP

Getting to know Illustrator and CorelDRAW

Becoming familiar with InDesign, QuarkXPress, and others

Web development tools are a vital part of any career in the field. It’s far easier to get work done using tools that you already have experience with. Your expertise in making a given tool “sing” can sometimes get you a job. Your skill with a specific tool can even seem more important than the skill you have in the actual discipline that you’re using the tool for!

A major hurdle to getting a web development job is often whether you have experience, and just how much experience, with one or more tools that are the standard in a given workplace.

This can lead to a major “chicken and egg” problem that’s a version of the age-old work-related quandary: You can’t get a job if you don’t have experience, but you can’t get experience if you don’t have a job.

With tools, you can’t get a job using a tool if you don’t yet have experience using that tool, but you can’t get experience using a tool unless you have a job using it.

In this chapter, we start by describing how to get experience using a tool, and then give brief descriptions of some of the major graphics tools used in web development. In Chapter 15, we tackle website development tools and content management systems.

The lists of tools and their descriptions will help you decide how to target your learning efforts.

Getting Experience with Web Dev Tools

Here’s a quandary: You need experience using a tool to get a job, but the main way you get experience using tools is via on-the-job training. Tied to the problem of getting experience using a tool is how to get access to the tool itself. Many web development tools are very expensive, such as up to $1,000 for a major tool like Adobe Photoshop.

We discuss the major ways in which you get experience using tools and how, within each of these different approaches, the issue of getting access to the tool itself is usually handled.

College and university programs

College and university programs are great ways to learn how to use the major tools in a given web development discipline. You can even get for-credit courses in using major tools like Photoshop or InDesign.

It’s kind of wonderful and annoying, all at the same time, to take a course in how to use a tool. It’s wonderful because you can really give the tool some focused time, learning all the tips and tricks. It’s annoying because courses are usually taught to the less experienced and slower-to-learn people in a classroom setting. If you already have some experience with a tool, or are just quick to pick things up, waiting for the class to get around to teaching you something new can feel like watching paint dry.

If you’re really not getting much out of a course, you’ll have to move on. But when in doubt, hang in there. The information in a course is valuable, but so is the structure it’s delivered in. You see how professionals communicate information so that other people can absorb it better, and how each new concept depends on previous ones. You can use this approach in working with colleagues. The contacts you make when taking a course are also worthwhile, especially if you’re “head of the class” and can help other people out.

Try to spend a good chunk of your time on tool-related courses. Each tool you learn can make a difference in the job world later.

Another great feature of college and university courses concerning software tools is that they normally offer free or very low-cost access to tools that, out in the real world, are quite expensive. Employer policies vary, but most web design professionals like to have personal licenses for the tools they use the most. Colleges and university offerings often include access to key tools not only while you’re in college, but a way to “graduate” to continued low-cost licensing afterward. Check into this carefully.

Many key web design tools are becoming available on a monthly licensing basis. The licenses, although they can add up to a fee that’s expensive over time, allow you to get through periods when you’re between roles — such as after you leave school, but before you start work — without having to consider spending thousands of dollars for new permanent licenses for key tools.

Online courses and self-study

There are now a plethora of online courses available for major software tools, and you can use a book — or online resources that you stitch together — to develop your own miniature curriculum as well. This approach can end up being somewhere between the structure and networking potential of a college or university course (see preceding section) and the more haphazard approach that most of us take to on-the-job training (OJT; see the following section).

The difference between self-study and OJT is that self-study is time that you consciously set aside to delve into the workings of a software tool, without being driven by needing a particular trick or technique for the work immediately in front of you. Being able to spend a few hours in this more exploratory and reflective learning mode every so often, for each of the tools you use, is extremely valuable. It also makes you more productive and increases your feeling of satisfaction with your work.

If you know a certain genre of software, you can pick up a different program in the same genre pretty easily through online courses and self-study. For instance, if you know Photoshop, learning the freeware alternative GIMP is not that hard. Quickly learning the key points of one new tool by using your knowledge of an existing tool of the same type is often a good technique to use to get up to speed before a job interview or the first day on a new job, but learning your first program of a given type requires more effort and commitment, such as an in-person course.

Using self-study is also great when you are trying to learn about a tool — that is, exploring whether it’s something you want to add to your personal toolkit. You’ll often want to do this kind of exploration before committing to either purchasing a tool yourself or — perhaps just as big a commitment of your personal resources — getting your corporate IT department to approve it for purchase.

Figure 14-1 shows a list of online learning resources for CalJOBS, an employment website for California. You can start checking out the CalJobs site at www.caljobs.ca.gov.

Figure 14-1: CalJOBS gives you a list of online learning resources to help you get a job in California.

The licensing situation for online courses and self-study is often poor. Many tools give you a free month, for instance, of using a tool before you buy it. That’s helpful, but it leaves you rushing to do your experimentation or use it before the month is up. And you might then have a difficult decision to make as to whether to buy the software or give up on it.

Having monthly licenses available, as more and more web design software does, certainly helps. But there’s no ideal solution for getting new tools into your personal toolkit.

On-the-job training

Many of us learn to use key tools by messing around with them in the process of doing our work. This is usually accompanied by occasional questions directed at colleagues, extensive use of the Help system for the software in question, perusing of YouTube videos on the topic, reading of books on the topic, and extensive searches of online bulletin boards used by people experienced with the software.

On-the-job training (OJT) is a great way to learn things, and it’s the default method for a lot of software education. However, because you’re picking things up as you go along, you don’t know what you don’t know. There can be entire approaches to using a tool, or key tips and tricks, that you simply never run into if OJT is all you have.

We suggest augmenting OJT with an online course or a book. Either will give you the outsider’s perspective and collected folklore needed to take your use of the tool to the next level.

Because OJT happens in a work environment, the licensing situation is usually pretty good as well. Major tools should be covered by site licenses such that everyone who needs to use a tool has it, and everyone is on the same version.

Figure 14-2 shows a list of on-the-job training and apprenticeship programs for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, widely known as the VA. You can find the list at www.benefits.va.gov/gibill/onthejob_apprenticeship.asp.

Figure 14-2: The VA has a list of on-the-job training and apprenticeship resources.

Corporate IT often tries to save money by limiting licenses tightly, not upgrading to a new version of software, and so on. There is also often limited internal support for tools beyond the core office productivity suite. It often comes down to the company saving a few thousand dollars while people who are, as a group, making millions of dollars a year in salary are slowed down or stopped in their work. Coordinate with other web development professionals in your workplace to call attention to inadequate licensing and support policies, and get them fixed — or consider moving to an organization that can make these basic necessities available to you gracefully.

What is often challenging at work is getting the tools that you use at work, especially the latest versions, onto your own personally owned computer that you might prefer to use for some work at your job, as well as for side jobs outside the main workplace. Try to get support for licensing that lets you use all the tools that you can bring to bear, including your own personal computer(s), to do the work that’s in front of you.

Getting to Know Key Tools for Web Graphics

There are scores of popular tools for web design and hundreds of less-popular ones. In fact, the range of tools available is basically endless, as people will write their own tools, tweak open-source programs, create libraries of templates and samples, and take other steps that can make the learning curve for working in a new environment into something more resembling a cliff.

In order to bring some order to the chaos, we’re going to use Adobe’s Creative Suite as the organizing spine for much of this discussion. Adobe has tried to become a one-stop shop for design of all kinds and web design in particular. By using their software catalog as a starting point, we can help give you the insight needed to steer your own way through the maze — and through the maze of jobs at workplaces that favor particular sets of tools.

Photoshop and GIMP

Photoshop is the granddaddy of all web design tools. It’s the leading raster image-editing software program. Er, what does that mean?

Raster means that, to Photoshop, an image is a collection of pixels. Each pixel can be entirely unrelated to all the pixels surrounding it. Photographs are inherently well-suited to manipulation with raster image-editing software.