Reflection of class on Jan.12^th

  When I went to Nashville for Tennessee Educational Technology Conference with you and Dr. Templar on last December, I had a chance to try the newest Microsoft desktop computer named Studio Surface. After almost 10 minutes experiencing, I really thought that computer was completely designed for professional visual designers because of its powerful features on picture displaying and flexible operations on painting with hand and dedicated dial module which allows designers to change angles of a picture and zoom in or out arbitrarily. Well, the price was also strong enough.

  But for those visual designers who have not received any professional painting practice, I think a normal computer with powerful image editing software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator is the best tool for them to do excellent design no matter bitmap or vector images. And it’s not too difficult for amateur to learn and use essential features of Photoshop or Illustrator to do visual design as long as they can spend enough time on practicing it.

  For me, I have learned and used Photoshop for image designing by implementing various styles of templates from online resource center for almost 3 years before I came here. I tried to create a new image from scratch before but received an unacceptable result, that is, I couldn’t design any images without templates although I could operate Photoshop skillfully. I realized that I was not a real designer, just an operator who could only rearrange preset resources and add new components in a limited canvas of templates to recreate new images.

  Fortunately, I feel much better now after I finished today’s class and relevant reading because I know that using templates to do visual design does is a convenient and efficient way for me. And you know, synthesis and creating are advanced intellectual skill as well. But I need to do better on finding inspirations from other excellent designs to reinforce my cognition on artificial design.

  In addition, I usually like using PSD format of bitmap images to do visual design because it contains all of necessary information about an image I need and I can operate directly by Photoshop and convert it to other different image formats like JPEG or PNG. Absolutely, I can’t convey PSD format image to vector image unless I create a same AI format of vector image by Adobe Illustrator.