The First Step To Being Self-Taught

... is, quite naturally, throwing out the idea that you need formal training to do things.

I know that sounds self-evident, but it just dawned on me this week. I've struggled for a long time with the desire to do design work for web, image and video while knowing that I don't have the time or desire to attend classes. Philosophically, I've always believed that people can be self-taught and do well and have even done it myself with coding, but art and design have always felt like something impossible without classes.

It recently occurred to me that for the past 5 or so years, I've been creating presentations at work that are wildly different and more creative than anything else anyone at work is doing. This isn't egotistical, it's a sign that I spent time making the medium the message in my web 2.0 evangelization. I've grown to hate PowerPoint and it's flat and bland bullets-plus-images presentations. I love the ability to add links, buttons, videos and more that I get from Adobe InDesign.

I taught myself the InDesign techniques for creating interactive content and now use it as much as possible. My presentations are all embedded on websites and as full of motion and external content as I have time to make them. What's escaped me because of my own timidity is the traditional artistic design portion. Colors, layouts, shapes, image selections, I've had this mental block wherein I was convinced that only someone who has attended formal classes could do these things with confidence.

Nonsense! Gaining proficiency at the skills to make such design choices is no different than learning PHP, MySql, InDesign or anything else. Thanks to the web, if you want to learn stuff like this, all you have to do is dive in an start reading and watching.

I thought that this was the only way you could learn color theory.