Illustrator CS6 Training Courses

I've started teaching Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign CS6 1-day training courses, at introductory and intermediate level. I knocked up these in Illustrator as part of the training materials I gave the students, and liked the way they turned out.

2D Flash Games

I'm currently teaching another games course, this time based around the free cross-platform software Stencyl. This allows you to manage scenes, animations, collision detection and so on, as well as develop scripts called Behaviours to control how enemies react and so on.

The screens below are from a 2D shooter that I built as part of an in-class demo. Tiles made in Photoshop.

Games Technologies course - 'pixel art'

As part of an introductory course into Games Technologies, I've been teaching the students Adobe Illustrator. As part of a fun exercise in the last lesson, we produced bitmap style avatars for ourselves, limited to a very low 'resolution'. Mine is below!

E-Commerce Teaching

Updates have been a bit slow this year, as I've been teaching a whole pile of (new) courses. As well as the digital graphics / games development courses I tend to talk about on this blog, I've also got another hat teaching web development / e-commerce / eBay courses for people with small businesses.

As well as getting me up to speed on the current considerations, platforms and so on, it's been useful to approach website development from the point of view of different 'customer personae'. It's straightforward to assess a design based on what you think of it, but perhaps more instructive to put yourself in the place of a 'character' visiting the site, and see how it fares.

Hopefully I'll find the time to post more regularly, though with a flat move and upcoming summer courses, we'll see!