Should I take a Photoshop class so I can do my own marketing materials?
There is a local Photoshop class that I am thinking of taking. I have occasionally hired people to help with marketing materials, but sometimes I just need something quick, like a flyer or promotional materials. I am thinking I can learn Photoshop and do this on my own. That said, I have not used Photoshop myself and wondering if I would be getting in over my head. Is it worth me trying to explore this on my own?
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Mar 19, 2018
You should definitely take Photoshop classes. There are numerous classes available on YouTube and in case if you face any problem you can contact Adobe photoshop
customer support at [url="https://newzealand.babasupport.org/adobe-photoshop-customer-support/"][/url]
Jun 16, 2016
I had a similar experience at the beginning of my business life as a trainer when I wanted to take classes so I can design my own interactive video training sessions. I wanted to do everything on my own as per my own standards. So I traveled to another city get few days training by an expert. Going back to my office and started the implementation, I realized that my time was totally absorbed in the new practice rather than doing my priority business which is training. So I stopped. You don't need to learn everything to do it yourself. Find some good one to do it for you with affordable and reasonable cost cause your time is more expensive.
Jun 10, 2016
When in doubt hire a professional designer. Knowing software is NOT enough. Understanding branding and design trends and marketability is what will allow your ad campaigns to flourish. Invest in your brand, and hire a professional.If you need help, Its what i do all day every day - feel free to connect. www.mllgd.com
Jun 9, 2016
Any new skills, knowledge and experience is a benefit but then comes in the cost and time factor. To use certain certain types of programs comes with purchasing the software cost which some are very expensive and then it's the time taken to learn how to use them and then to become good at it. If you have time to learn, then it's a good idea but hiring a professional would give you professional results and so find out what it cost to hire compared to buying "software and learning "time needed".
Jun 9, 2016
First consider value of your time, you deed to spend on designing marketing material, against the cost of hiring a professional. Also, a professional always have experience with multiple clients that helps in design and development of impressive marketing material, effecting end result.
Choice is yours.
Jun 9, 2016
Great idea except what would go undone while you are trying to match professional graphic artists and measure up?
Jun 9, 2016
I would suggest establishing a relationship with a trained, professional graphic designer who can ensure that you are establishing and maintaining brand standards and delivering a consistent, quality presentation of your brand across everything you do. Consistency builds trust. Inconsistency results in confusion and distrust. I'm sure you can find a professional and work out a long-term financial arrangement that is suitable for both parties.
Jun 9, 2016
To create effective marketing materials you need to master InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, Photoshop is probably the least of them (all come as part of Adobe Creative Cloud for about $60/month).
But more importantly, and with the greatest respect, if you are not a designer, copywriter or marketing expert what makes you think you can create effective marketing materials? The tools listed above are just that, tools. Knowing how to use a drill doesn't make me a builder.
IMHO focus your attention on what you do best and hire an expert for your marketing materials. If you have a freelance consultant or agency on even a very small retainer, they should be able to turn around simple projects in 48 hours.
Jun 8, 2016
Photoshop is a powerful tool that has been in development since 1990. So, it is extremely full-featured as an image editor! That means it takes a long time to really master. Photographers will tell you it is a black hole time sucker! You fall in and wake up at 1:00 AM realizing you've been noodling for hours. It is great for retouching, layering, compositing, adjusting image quality parameters, etc. But for page composition? Not so much.
If you need flyers, Photoshop is NOT the program to learn first. It is one of many programs that might be used to work with images used in a flyer, but more likely you need a page layout program such as InDesign, combined with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, along with Illustrator or another vector drawing program.
For more information, go to Adobe.com.
All that said, I agree with those here who say that learning to do your own design is more than just learning one program, and it may also be a poor strategic use of your time. Good graphic designers are not terribly expensive these days, since that market is rather saturated with talent.
Jun 8, 2016
Have you tried CANVA? Visit Canva.com and it should help you with your quick marketing collateral needs. It's good for quick designs, but still limited in what you can do. It should help you.
Jun 8, 2016
Steve, Charley, and Shabaz all gave you some good advice. My advice is, do you have a golfer in your club who is a professional graphic designer? Offer him or her a full paid membership in your golf club. You could put a simple sign at the Pro Shop counter making this offer and see who responds (make sure to see their portfolio first of course.)
The idea of using Canva for simple brochures, etc. is a good one. Ditto for the whole concept of you (as a non-designer) staying away from trying to do a designer's job—DIY is definitely not the most time or cost efficient answer in the long run.
Jun 8, 2016
Question for a question: Do you change your own oil and did you take lessons to learn how? Or replace your roof?
As a pro photographer in a past life, I learned Photoshop - enough of it to do what I needed to get done (for example: NONE of us knows everything that, say, WORD does, but we use it... same for a huge program like Photoshop - you learn what you need to know and then use it).
Is your time better used being a MARKETER while leaving the graphic work to others? Probably so.
Hope this helps.
Charlie Seymour Jr
Jun 7, 2016
If you can find a class at your local community college might not be a bad idea. The class may teach you the basics. Don't know your skill level in Photoshop. But I am sure you can find plenty of YouTube videos on Photoshop - enough for you to get by.
Jun 6, 2016
As the majority of answers here already pointed, you should definitely take the Photoshop classes as you could use it for hundreds of purposes and not for just flyer or social media post designing.
On the other side, I have a great suggestion for you. If you find learning Photoshop difficult or complex on your own, meanwhile, you can use free online tools like Canva.
Here are few reasons I recommend Canva.com over photoshop if you just want to use it for Flyer designing and other basic designing needs. Photoshop has vast application areas like Web template designing, photo editing, abstract picture designing.
Designing flyers and promotional graphic requires more of vector work than photo editing. You may probably need Icons, illustrations, Graphical pieces like charts and banners, which are probably difficult to make in Photoshop.
Online tools like Canva have those already available for you. You can even customise them as per your need. Canva also provides hundreds of prebuilt templates to start from.
Let me line up all the benefits of Canva against Photoshop for basic designing purposes.
1. Minimum or No designing skills required.
Photoshop require time to become a pro at, it takes time getting used to so many tools in Photoshop. On the other hand, Canva requires just a basic creativity. They provide a ton of already available designs which you can edit and customize for you.
2. Already available resources.
I mentioned this already above; Canva not only provides designing templates but they also have thousands of free available stock photos, illustrations, vector graphics which you can customize on your own easily,
3. Already available fancy fonts
I know it doesn't seems much but Windows doesn't have good enough fonts built-in and installing new ones usually take your extra time. In Canva, they have a wide variety of fonts which are really eye pleasing and phycological perfect for different purposes.
Last but not least.
Most important. It's Free.
Canva is completely free. They do have a premium package available but that is not really necessary and doesn't bother you in any way. If you go for their premium package, you can have multiple people work on a same design.
Added to that, you can upload custom fonts (if you want more), save color profiles, change design sizes dynamically and much more.
I don't work for Canva, neither I am advertising them. I use Canva heavily for both my commercial and personal purpose and it works truly amazing. You can desing almost everything, I use it for Pamphlets, Flyers, Presentations, Infographics and Social media posts. I am also quite good in photoshop and use it for desired purposes, including abstract designing and photo editing.
TL;DR - Photoshop is good for photo related editing/retouching. It has wide application area. But, if you want good looking, attractive, quick design with minimal efforts, go for Canva.com.
Jun 5, 2016
A good rule of thumb is to pay others to do stuff, that get paid less than you do, to do your stuff. So if you get paid $200 an hour to provide your product or service, then don't do $100 an hour stuff. Doing fun stuff (especially like that) can be a great opportunity to go down the 'rabbit hole' of procrastination too. You could easily end up saying, "wow, I spent the whole day touching up that photo!".
Jun 4, 2016
From your profile, it looks like you're the recreation and events manager at a golf course. Is it part of your job to come up with flyers and promotional materials? If it is, then it's not a bad idea to learn Photoshop. However, my guess is you don't have the expertise in design, typography, composition, etc. that a professional who uses the software would.
Jun 3, 2016
Learning photoshop yourself is surely a great skill that comes handy in emergency. However, you got to have the creative cells to implement the skills. I decided to learn it 6 years ago and it's one of the best thing I did, even if I don't create all of my marketing materials myself. But my personal visuals don't stop surprising and inspiring my audience for their simplicity yet creativity. I mostly do them myself. Go for it!
Jun 3, 2016
Why not - it only takes a couple weeks to learn Photoshop.
But do know the fastest way to learn what to do with this new skill is a 3 year design BA. Learning design and advertising on your own would take way too long to be practical in your career. While many people save thousands of dollars in paying professionals fees, they often fail too see how much they are giving up in sales and their company image. Pay the very best designers you can afford and take on other, much easier DIY aspects of your company such as accounting to save money.
Jun 3, 2016
Yes. One of the top ten best work-related things I've done. People make a career of this. It is rich and thick and leads you off to several other related fields all of which add up to make a complete marketing materials production workflow. Photography comes to mind. I get more clients lacking photos of content than anything else.
If I had a psd class available, I would bring in ten examples of marketing materials that I would want to know how to do. The devil be here. In these details. As others pointed out, if you do print media for your club, then printer issues need to be top of mind. Bleeds, guides, paper sizes, and basic paper vocab come to mind, else you're not helping the workflow and you'll end up paying someone (maybe your printer) to redo your work because it's not good enough or it won't print like you want it to.
Take the class. The need will never go away. Even if you leave the club and go elsewhere PSD is a very portable skill set. ALSO OF VALUE is the vocabulary you start to pick up - drop shadow, full bleed, blend mode, etc. and the perspective on what makes a piece particularly good or not. Design and layout start to loom large, once you have some vocab picked up, which learning PSD will do for you.
Very important to recognize that Photoshop is a tool. It's at the tactical level. Design is at the strategic top of the pile and layout is higher up as well. Photoshop works best when design and layout are recognized.
enjoy it! Photoshop is great!
He should learn some things about not only Photoshop, but design. It would put him ahead of most of the people who design with golf in mind. There are some very beautiful golf course web sites, but many are not so good. I have found out many of the same things about other types of web sites for smaller organizations - they usually hire someone in house who may or may not have some design abilities. In the radio-control model airplane world, I've seen some very beautiful web sites (I hope the one I did for the Frankenmuth Aeromodelers was good, as I do web design for part of my living), and some ones slapped together.