Digital Foundations

This book was written by two artist educators who teach digital art and design studio foundation classes. While teaching classes that take place in software laboratories, we noticed that many of our students expected to learn to use software, but gave little consideration to aesthetics or art and design history. A typical first day question is, "Are we going to learn Photoshop in this class?" At first we were tempted to oblige our students' thirst for so-called practical knowledge, but we recognize that in the absence of the visual, theoretical, and historical frameworks, practical knowledge is practically useless. To teach our classes, we used the very best of the software training manuals, and supplemented them with all the visual and historical material that was missing. After settling for years on books that don't really encapsulate a class, we finally decided to write the book that we think all introductory media design students should be using. For us, a student is anyone actively engaged in learning. A student can be working towards a degree in art, communication, graphic design, illustration, and so on in a traditional classroom setting, or a self-taught found-it-on-the-bookstore-shelf learner. In the twenty chapters that follow, we have shared small bites of history, followed by visual references, and then digital exercises that explore creative software in a manner that brings design principles into the software demo. Originally, this book was printed as a manual to the Adobe Creative Suite, the software found in classrooms and labs around the country. Just a month after the book was published, we teamed up with Floss Manuals to convert our manuscript into one that teaches the same design principles using open source software.