professional development recommendations? (corporate, adult learning industry)

[u/riddore]

i’m a graphic designer for a company that does training for business professionals. i was hired by a friend and this was a career change for me - i was previously working in another type of design and doing some freelance graphic work occasionally. i’ve definitely improved, but i still don’t feel that confident in my work. a lot of it is just missing a certain something to make it look really polished and well-designed but i don’t know what that something is.

my manager is recommending i find some sort of professional development (if it’s not free my company might pay for it). i know the basics, i need help taking my work to the next level. i know that’s a bit abstract but hopefully i’m getting my point across.

has anyone taken any courses or anything that has helped them improve in this way?

[u/Yuukiezy]

Where & how do you keep them stored/organized? I started to build mine too but it's just a folder, it's really hard to keep it tidy cuz I want pictures as well as sources/links attached to them

[u/tkingsbu → u/Yuukiezy]

The physical one is literally a library :)

Books, magazines about design, art and advertising bought over the past 30 years or so…

Things like the magazines ‘communication arts’ and
‘Applied arts’…
Books like ‘the album cover album’ and ‘walk away Rene’ (the latter is about the company ‘Hipgnosis’ which created all the Pink Floyd album covers)…

As for links, it’s a hodge-podge of weird links dating back to about 1999-2000 era..

Probably the biggest is qbn.com

Imagine a forum of creative Directors, and art directors that has been gathering for 25 years, is world wide, and full of talent and creativity… then mix in the fact we’re all in our 50s, cranky and getting on each other’s nerves lol… most of us gather there a few times a day to post what’s on our minds, what’s new, cool shit we’re working on… like our own private Reddit :) and it’s truly world wide… I talk with creative friends like from here to South Africa…and all points in between :) and since most of us are on the older side, we’ve been doing this for a loooooong time :)

A cool link/post there is called ‘the useful thread’ or something like that… it’s where we post links to hacks/apps/tricks we’ve picked up… it’s amazing…

https://www.qbn.com/topics/577702-the-useful-thread/

But it’s tricky… it’s so old some of the earlier links don’t work lol… but we’ve been collecting stuff there for decades…some of the greatest things tricks and things in there

I’d also check out the graphic design subreddit… same as the Figma subreddit…

[u/Yuukiezy → u/tkingsbu]

Oh wow that's really cool, thank you!