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Art Tips For Programmers?
An anonymous reader writes "Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with artwork. My programming contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone an artist. The art needs aren't intensive, mostly icons or sprites depending on the project. Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor. Are there any other developers who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of making graphics that look professional?" One resource for the less-artistic among us is the collection of free SVG clip art at freedesktop.org, though it won't give advice for creating new art. What are some others?
... then you can afford to commision a graphic designer ;)
I agree. And you can generally find some very cheap (even dare I say it, free) labor at the local art college in your area. You know, the Art Institute of Whatever for instance. You will get some good artwork cheap, and if your sign the right papers for them at the school, they will get credit for an internship. It works very well for both of you. I have done this when I was in school and I helped out some folks with some artwork. I got class credit for it, so I didn't mind working for free. Then, once I graduated, I moved it into a mostly-full-time freelance job. Then, later, I started outsourcing my own work to another school. So, it all comes around full-circle, and everyone wins.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
Mmmkay.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'm a professional designer with much experience with web sites. I've also worked on many other projects including a familiar theme for Enlightenment back when Enlightenment was popular.
I've seen a lot of sites designed by developers and I can tell you what to do - listen to what I say and you'll be better than 90% of the sites on the net: keep it simple.
This works on so many levels it's ridiculous. The most well designed sites with the most expensive designers do this as a matter of course. It's not only refreshingly easy on the eyes it's also good business.
Don't try to be gabocorp or razorfish - those guys already have the look-at-me-look-at-me-look-at-me market saturated. Most paying clients want something more professional. Stick to what you do well - developing, hopefully - and it'll get the recognition it deserves with a design that lets your real work shine through.
Pick a nice color scheme, stay away from comic sans and courier and you're halfway there. Leave the graphics for photos and logos, use color sparingly, and limit yourself to as few different colors and fonts as possible.
If you're really interested you could pick up a few design or mac magazines - really! even if you don't use a mac - just to get an idea of what clean & simple design is like.
as unlikely as it sounds, one book i got a LOT from was "photoshop 5 for dummies" - i've had 15+ programming experience, 10 years multimedia including formal study, and this book taught me more about professional production of graphics than just about anything else, and yes made me self sufficient to the extent i was hired as a design team leader instead of senior programmer on the last job.... so give it a try and forget the dummies stigma....
You certainly can produce excellent icon-level art, even if you have no talent at drawing at all. You still need a decent sense of aesthetics, though.
As one example, I've generated several icons for the (commercial) application I develop using an almost perversely hackish approach.
I write a perl script that uses GD::Image to draw a large (512x512) version of the shape I want, using plain flat colours for each region. No drawing skill required, no need for pixel-accurate mouse movements. When I'm happy with the shape and colours of the icon I run it through aquatint to give it a glassy 3d look and a drop-shadow. Looks great.
(But for the toolbar icons and so on I licensed a generic iconset from IconExperience. An excellent investment in software that doesn't look like it sucks, for less than the price of a legal copy of PhotoShop.)
I just want to relate to you... I HAVE THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM. and it sucks alot that the end user I'm developing for always see's the poor art work and thinks the whole app must be poor. I always spend twice as long on the artwork in photoshop than on the code. And I've come to the conclusion... I don't have it. I just don't. so I'll be paying artist from now on. A great place to find people for cheap.. is your local college campus. College kids have it sometimes better than professionals, and they will work for peanuts, or in my case, I just pay them per graphic or layout/design instead of 125/hr. good luck! -Cody cody@codywalker.com
As an artist on -- and former staff member of -- deviantART: To anyone looking for pre-existing icons and stuff to use, please ask permission of the artist! Many artists would gladly grant permission to someone looking to use thier work so long as it's properly asked for. Spare a headache on both sides. :)
Who doesn't like free music?
"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;
A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/?
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....
STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"
3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..
some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!
4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...
Good Luck!
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
One hat I wear is that of a designer. I probably spend about 1 - 2 months out of the year doing artwork for Web sites and applications. I have provided the design work for hundreds (if not thousands) of Web sites and programs in one way or another, as you will see below...
Steal your ideas, mine have been ripped off more times than I can keep track of and I assure you no one is ever going to be able to do anything about it.
I see it all the time, some slick looking site based on another designer's ideas, and it hurts bad when it is my own work getting stolen. I have had companies provide me with other people's conceptual sketches (in some cases, sketches from friends of mine that I already know have not been paid for) and ask if I can do the same thing cheaper. I have had people ask me how I pulled off some neat trick in Flash, gone to their email domain and seen my work being copied frame for frame. I have found watermarks in content I made showing up in other people's sites and been told no visual idea belongs to anyone. Originality stopped being a virtue in 1997, why even try?
You should steal whatever artistic concepts you think you need, cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop should be sufficent for any purpose. Intellectual property is a joke unless you have an army of lawyers, and it still costs too much for most companies to come after you unless you are costing them big bucks. Consider buying a scanner so you can steal ideas from magazines and newspapers as well - ESPN the Magazine is a great source of content to lift and maybe it will keep my stuff safe.
Just put 'Artisitic Genius' on your business card and tell people you are Picasso's evil twin. Go spawn children and steal... uh... 'study' their crayon drawings for use in your work. Carry Silly Putty to lift tattoo outlines directly from people's skin and pass them off as your own. Spend all your time at hotels and pay for your meals by signing them off to other people's rooms. Give up technology and just start mugging people, same thing. Phish.
If anyone ever calls you on stealing artwork, refuse to acknowledge the 'similarities', tell them to bite you and claim they stole YOUR ideas. If they still bug you, find out their phone number and threaten their families in the middle of the night. It works.
M
I've got just enough artist in me to get by, but sometimes when working in Gimp or Blender (my 2D and 3D apps of choice) I'll find my programmer side coming through a bit too much.
:^)
.jpg gets rid of information you'll never get back. You have a tendancy to make things independant of each other, put that into using several layers and selection groups.
:^)
Sometimes I spend a great deal of time getting things exactly even, or lined up precisely when it doesn't matter, or getting the image dimensions in pixels to be even multiples of 16. (Seriously, my geek side is like the Gollum to my Smeagol.)
My primary piece of advice would be not to obsess over symmetry or nice numbers, to temporarily set aside your inclinations to make everything general-purpose and extensible. You can adjust vertices by 0.1 units every time, or you can just move the damn things somewhere that looks about right. The latter will look better. Save copies often if you're worried that it won't. (But it will!
As a programmer you do have a couple advantages. Turn your tendancies to over-engineer a problem into making the thing higher-resolution than you would possibly need. You know scaling down or compressing to
And most of all, if your work looks anything at all like something you might see in Windows XP, or reminds you in any way of any MPlayer skin you've seen recently, it should be scrapped immediately unless you want your project to look fugly on purpose.
A great book that should be read by coders etc. looking to do their own design graphics is "About Face - The Essentials of Interface Design" by Alan Cooper. It's informative, and also funny. ;)
Example: A person's PC is about to crash, and a box pops up on the screen that says, "System failure. You will lose all your data." Then there's a button below that says, "Okay".
(Maybe an amusing little grinning demon icon would make it 'look' better