FaeDubh

We’ve all read tutorials at some point or the other, or we’ve had tutorials to share. While some aim at teaching you how to make a certain single graphic, others aim at opening you up to various possibilities by explaining what each function does. Which one would you prefer and how many do you remember enough to use while designing?

I remember the times when I would browse various tutorial sites and be amazed at all the different effects that can be achieved during my early Photoshop days. But now, there are only a handful of tutorials that I recall and have actually found useful while designing, like Lin’s Sharpening Using the High Pass Filter, for example. Though simple, it’s effectively repeatable.

I’m not too fond of the ones that teach you how to make a single avatar, while using a texture from a certain site and a brush set from another. Sure, the tutorial does its job in serving its purpose, but I’ve found it cumbersome to be linked to other sites to download other things before I can start the tutorial. I’d rather read something that shows you, comparatively and with examples, how useful applying textures, gradients, or brushes can be to a graphic or the different techniques that can be employed instead.

“Actually teach someone a SKILL rather than how to duplicate an exact thing.”

That serves true in most cases. Skills are handy. You can refine, re-use and polish them to create a whole spectrum of possibilities other than what the tutorial would have originally intended.

And of course, I do realise that with such let’s-duplicate-this tutorials, sometimes they’re only linking to their own resources. I also realise that readers are often aware that it’s not just the only way that particular effect can be achieved, but also that they can and most likely will add twists of their own.

Which is great. In fact, I would go ahead and say that sometimes, the very same tutorials that I find annoying and troublesome, I’ve actually found useful when I come across an effect I like or didn’t know of before. I suppose that renders my previous statements hypocritical but in truth, it really depends on your perception.

A tutorial that teaches you how to create, say an orb, isn’t any different from one that shows you how to code a form. Both require some sort of duplication and because they do, it doesn’t really mean that it’s a bad tutorial. By definition, these tutorials do exactly what they were laid out to. A better tutorial would be one that showed you how else and what other things can be achieved using a single function or effect.

So while I originally started this article to discuss and possibly recommend a better way to write a tutorial - one that teaches a function rather than a mere duplication, I’m left at par with how much a person can truly infer from any tutorial in particular.