Teaching Myself Graphic Design: Day One

Well, here I go embarking on this crazy journey to transform myself from a boring, boilerplate corporate lawyer to an awesome, arty graphic designer. And doing it as quickly as possible because girl's gotta eat. Thank goodness there are so many awesome resources online.

I started with these two articles, which each list a bunch of additional resources:

Karen X. Cheng's "How to Become a Designer Without Going to Design School"

DesignTut's "Teach Yourself Graphic Design: A Self Study Course Outline"

So, I acquired Adobe Creative Suite and bought this book on drawing and a book explaining how pictures work. While those are in transit, I signed up for Lynda.com (they give you a free 10-day trial!) and dove into the "Illustrator CC One-on-One: Fundamentals with Deke McClelland" series of web tutorials.

Here's the first circle I drew in Illustrator. It's sad and wonky, like a half-assed Shel Silverstein character.

Also, it just took me 30 minutes to figure out how to get the sad circle I drew in Illustrator into this blog without it looking fuzzy and way in the corner. Still don't think I did it right, but this will DO for now.