Customer Reviews

Graphic Design Portfolio-Builder: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator Projects

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

[...] The company is centered around on line training in the general area of graphics design. ==This book is designed to go with one of their courses. The goal of this course is to help you create a portfolio of your work. It has a series of projects where you download various components of a project, then you do the project and post your results back on-line. A Sessions instructor will then give you a short critique of your work so you will have specific person to person contact that lets you know how you are progressing. This is kind of like working as a designer and having the client look at what you've done.

As you might well guess from the sub-title, these projects are oriented to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This is not exactly a beginners course in these software package. You should have at least some beginning understanding of how to use these packages. The concentration hers is on improving your design skills, not on the details of the software.

Graphic Design Portfolio Builder is a good supplemental book for designers and beginning students. I wrote supplemental because this book does not comprehensively cover the features of Photoshop and Illustrator software (and it wasn't suppose to) but to help beginners you get familiar with the software and up and running.

The book is very colorful, well laid out and full of useful information. What is comphrehensive is that it covers all aspects of what designers or artists would face and be challenged at work or in classrooms. Each lesson is written by an professional designers and artists with years of experience and I highly enjoyed reading the chapters so far.

The projects in the book are fairly challenging and somewhat time consuming which is good since it makes you explore the software to its full potential if you're feeling ambious.

For inspirations, I recommend you checkout other students work in the book or on their website. It really challenges you to come up with your best work and experiment with different ideas and creative concepts.

PROS:
Easy reading... lots of hands on pratice, which is also worded in an easy to understand language... Comes with a FREE membership to basically a webgroup website, but if you choose to take advantage of the service, the very authors of the book will critique and help you develop your projects, VERY HELPFUL/VERY COOL

CONS:
You have to have photoshop and illustrator in order to take advantage of this product

Having taught graphic design for the last 13years, I am always looking for material to use as a reference or even text in my classes. This book gives many ideas on projects that students can use to create a quality looking portfolio for that first job interview. Even though I am constantly encouraging my students to go beyond the simple text assignment, many do not. This book my just give them that spark to do just that.

This book was so very helpful in aiding my desire to build a portfolio! It helped me learn more about Photoshop and Illustrator - plus gave me assignments that were reviewed and critiqued by a very helpful and polite instructor. This is more than just a book it is a full class at a book rate! I would recommend it to anyone looking for this type of work or just to improve what they already know.

This book is full of good ideas, but the necessary graphics for the projects
can only be accessed by students of the design school who have access to a special code.
Without is you can only review the projects, then try to come up with graphics of your
own for the tutorials.
Overall, not worth the almost $40 that I paid for it!!! The description should have stated that the required code would not be available.
Also, I received the book without so much as a slip of paper or sales receipt from the book store I bought it from.

This book sounds better than it is. Your get a web site that you are supposed to be able to download projects and then put on the site to get feed back and see other students work. When you get to the site, they are trying to sell you the book and let you read a chapter on the site. I wanted to use it to create a portfolio so I could start my job search. This was a waste of money. I still don't have a portfolio and no help with creating one!!
I greatly disappointed and upset!!!!!

I borrowed this book from a graphic designer at work. At the time, I had just finished my certification and didn't know what to do about a portfolio. I kept it for a couple of weeks, and then bought my own copy. This book is awesome! It shows you step-by-step techniques on pieces to put in your portfolio and reviews some skills on Illustrator and Photoshop. It also gives you some hints on some effects you'd like to make on the project. To top it off, you get to post your work on a forum and get feedback from the institution's instructors! Definitely a must-have! Caution: this book is hard to get brand new since it is out of print.

This book is terrible. The projects are lame and uninspiring. I would never show up with a portfolio based on the projects in this book. The Graphic Design Exercise Book by Jessica Glaser and Carolyn Knight offers much better ideas and options.