In this section you will be asked to examine a range of products, such as posters, books, magazines, posters, t-shirts and mugs and evaluate the effectiveness of each against certain criteria, such as: audience and purpose; impact/visual effect; use of colour.

In this section you will gather ideas for product designs from a range of secondary sources. You will use capture techniques, such as scanning and digital photography to ensure that the materials are in a form suited to your products; for example, the resolution of images needs to be higher for printed products than for screen-based products. You will also prepare materials yourself, using a digital camera, or graphics software (or hand-drawn/painted and then scanned).

In this section you will learn the differences between bitmap and vector images and the advantages and limitations of each. This will help you to use the most appropriate format when you create or gather materials for your graphics products.

In this section you will further experiment with software tools to find the most effective ways of producing effective bitmap and vector graphics. You will have to judge the effectiveness of what you produce against the requirements of the product and the target audience. As you will have already discovered in earlier sections, you will almost certainly not produce the most effective results at first attempts and you will be encouraged to refine your work. This will be in the light of feedback from others and your own assessment of your work.

In the initial stages of design, it may be helpful to simply use paper and pencil to sketch out initial ideas.

This section provides explanation of each of the vector-based and bitma-based software tools, together with examples of their application. In this way you will better understand when and how to use them.

In this section we explain in more detail some of the technical aspects that you need to consider in preparing images for screen and print.

For screen images you will need to consider resolution and colour mix to ensure display quality. You will also learn about file formats used for screen display and compression to ensure acceptable download times, particularly over the Internet and other remote networks.

For images destined for printing, you also need to consider resolution, which is higher than that needed for screen images. You also need to be aware of different colour models. There are also other issues to be considered, including, for example, the type of printer or printing process, the medium (paper, card, fabric, etc).

Interactive Tutorials in the use of Macromedia Fireworks