1.4 What You’ll Need to Take This Course

We'll be tackling a number of hands-on projects over the course lessons, including designing a logo, formatting typography, and creating a style guide template. And for these, you're going to need to have access to a few different software programs. For this course, we'll be using the trinity of Adobe Creative Products, so that's Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. If you don't already have versions of these installed on your computer and any version from CS4 onwards. So that's CS4, CS5, CS6, and CC is going to be suitable for tackling the projects. You can download a 30 day free trial of Adobe CC from the Adobe website. And those trials will give you plenty of time to complete this course. Of course, there are other options of vectorizing the logos and laying out guide templates such as CorelDRAW, Inkscape and Quark but to follow the specific techniques that we'll be applying in the course projects, your going to need access to these Adobe programs. This course is aimed at students who are competent with using Adobe products, and have an intermediate to advanced level of understanding of using the software. But don't panic if you feel that you are more at the beginner to intermediate level. All the techniques are going to be really clearly explained. I also want to stress to you that this course is inviting you to be creative with designing brands. I'm going to take you through the steps of creating an identity for the Buzz Studio brand, but you can approach the course projects in two different ways. If you prefer to learn by imitation I would really encourage you to create the Buzz Brand alongside me and do as I do. But if you feel a bit more confident about the technical side of things, you can choose to get a bit more creative and design your own unique brand as you go through the project lessons, just using the Buzz designs as a guide. It's really up to you how you prefer to learn and what you feel comfortable with doing. And I want you to get the most out of the course, so choose the route which you feel you're going to get the most out of. So with that being said, the first thing for you to do is to make sure that you have the Adobe software installed and ready to go. We'll begin with using them over in the next chapter of the course.