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Anyone who has set out to learn Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other design tool has probably tackled several tutorials along the way. Online tutorials are plentiful, surely an invaluable resource for those who seek to learn. However, tutorials alone are certainly not the end-all, be-all of design education. As good as any lesson might be, the true knowledge you take away depends largely on what you bring to the table.

Ironically, as countless as online tutorials may be in number, there are few available resources devoted to teaching designers-in-training exactly how to make the most of tutorials. The importance of this, I believe, goes beyond any individual tutorial you may stumble across. The finest tutorial in the world won’t do a thing for a student who has no desire to truly learn the subject matter.

While I make no claims to be the finest designer in the land, I do have the immediate experience of having been a devoted student of design for the past few years. I have worked through countless tutorials — some for better, others for worse — and in all my of journeys have taken away a few useful lessons.

What follows might be called a theoretical approach to making the most out of a tutorial. Depending on your relative skill level and familiarity with the tool in question, the specifics of this approach may be more useful for some than for others. However, the underlying framework remains applicable across the board, whether you are a novice or an expert, no matter what the tool in question.

Preface: Finding a good tutorial to work with

The crucial first step in tackling a tutorial is finding a good tutorial to work with. The specifics of this approach will vary depending on your tool, but there are a few important considerations that seem universally applicable.

Above all, try to find tutorial resources that are (1) maintained by a single person (or small group of people); and (2) consistent in the quality of their tutorials. Try to avoid sites that offer “hundreds of tutorials” collected from various different sources: these sites tend to lack consistency and seem stale. Sites operated by a single individual (or small group of people) usually provide quality content, as well as the opportunity for rich feedback from both the tutorial author and regular visitors to the site.

For Photoshop and Illustrator, I recommend the following tutorial resources as some of my favorite:

• PSD Tuts
• BittBox Illustrator Tutorials
• Web Design Wall :: Design Trends & Tutorials
  
• Veerle’s Blog :: Tutorials
• Computer Arts Tutorials (UK Magazine)

To go along with the steps below, I have chosen to follow a recent tutorial at PSD Tuts: creating a grunge poster. I have not had much experience with the grunge aesthetic, so I thought this might be a good example to work with.

Stage One: Follow Along Exactly

Once you find a tutorial, a good first step is to follow it exactly step-by-step. In the context of the stages I will describe later, it is important to following along and imitate exactly what the tutorial demonstrates (down to the last detail). Why? To shut off your creative mind. In this initial stage, the main objective is to go through the mechanical steps.

Don’t bring thinking into it yet. Keep it technical. This will lay the groundwork for the future stages, where the technical skills are assumed and the creative energies are beckoned forth. If you try to do both of these things too early, you risk running into more than one wall at a time, something sure to stop you in your tracks and rob you of the benefits you’d otherwise gain from completing the entire tutorial process.

Particularly in Photoshop, you will find that many tutorials ask you to apply a certain filter or layer settings. In this first stage, mimic the settings they give you straight away. Don’t worry about the “why?” or “what does this setting do?” questions just yet. The concern here is to imitate each action in a timely manner.

If you do have any questions or ideas you would like to explore further, take a moment to write them down — you’ll get to them later. This first stage is not the best time to follow every side-trail, or you will easily get knocked off your primary task and lose track of your greater objective.

You may get stuck at one or more places in the tutorial you choose. For whatever reason, you may not be able to follow along smoothly, whether it be because of your own skill level or an area where the tutorial isn’t clear. No matter what: do not get hung up over little details. The most important thing in this stage is to get through the entire process. If you messed something up, take note of it: you will have a chance to improve the next time around.

For the tutorial I have chosen to follow, the result after this first stage is below. I followed the instructions as closely as I could. While there were a few points where I wasn’t able to follow along exactly, but I stayed on target and reached the end. As you can see, things aren’t 100% identical, but for the most part I stayed on track.

Stage Two: Get Innovative

Finished working through the tutorial for the first time? Good… but don’t think you’re done, for the work has just begun. It is at this stage where amateurs will move along, leaving behind the skills and techniques they have just been introduced to. For aspiring professionals, the real work now begins.

In stage two, the primary goal is to go through the tutorial again, but this time you will deviate from the prescribed course and begin to introduce subtle changes to the exercise. Use different colors, images, brushes, and assets of all kinds. While the underlying approach to the exercise remains unchanged, you will begin to make the work your own. This is when you will take the time to explore the tangential paths that beckoned during stage one.

Unlike the first stage, it is important that you do not race through this second phase. Take some time to explore and play around with things. Ask questions about why the original tutorial makes certain choices and what purpose these choices serve. Begin to think about where you might take these techniques with your own work in the long run. If you like, you can steer yourself away from the principles that don’t seem to make sense to you, and guide yourself toward the ones that seem revelant. You are still bound to the tutorial, but you’re gaining an increasing amount of control. Continue to work through until the exercise is finished, yet again.

Below is my progress after completing stage 2. I used the same general grunge approach (along with the stripes), but mixed up the color and made the text a bit more relevent to my own website. I was sure to spend some more time with the filter settings, as well as making sure I nailed the white stained border that I missed out on in the first stage.

Stage Three: Make it Your Own

In this final stage, you will approach the blank canvas one final time. This time around, however, you are off the leash: take the techniques you have learned and fully make them your own. It is up to you: anything is possible.

By all means, do not necessarily expect your final product to resemble the original tutorial at all. Rather, this might be thought of as an ordinary graphic exercise that happens to use techniques you’ve just learned.

Perhaps the most important aspect in this final stage is to make your work relevant to you as a designer. How can these techniques be used in my everyday work? How might future projects benefit from these skills? Be sure to ask these questions, thinking long and hard about the answers. You have wrestled with and tamed the knowledge in stages one and two, and now is the time to follow through with the education process.

My result after this third stage is as follows. I have decided to build off of my result in stage 2 and build a website layout around this design aesthetic:

In the end, your design arsenal will be bolstered with yet another technique waiting to serve your needs. There will always be more to learn, but the least you can do is make sure you are retaining the techniques you’re introducing yourself to. Going through these three steps will help ensure this happens.

Conclusion: Sharing Your Work & Final Thoughts

A tremendous benefit available to all internet-equipped designers these days is the ease with which users might share their work, even from tutorial exercises. This gives you a chance to not only showcase your budding talents, but also get feedback and ideas from others who have followed the same tutorials and utilized the same techniques.

This is something I have only just started to explore, but the possibilities (with Flickr alone) seem very promising. Two of my favorite tutorial resources, BittBox and PSD Tuts, each have Flickr groups for user-submitted images. Very handy indeed!

• PSD Tuts Flickr Group
• BittBox Flickr Group

So: go forth, conquer, and share!

In the end, it seems that the most important thing to keep in mind when thinking about tutorials is that the techniques covered are ultimately meant to serve our design needs. While discovering these tutorials and techniques may be easier than ever, it is much more difficult to fully assimilate them into our design arsenal.