Xara Designer Pro education course learning and training resource

[Xhris]

My course is now V11 ready. Enjoy!

Some info and feedback:-

I worked intensely to try and get it out sooner (than was comfortable). I appreciate the thanks received so far; please let people know about this course if they have any questions about the software as they crop up in the future.

It has taken a good couple of weeks of solid work in my own time to carefully modify the course with the new content. Lots of subtle changes have been made since V10 which mean a lot of fine toothed combing through my detailed planning notes were needed to ensure old defunct material is removed and new material added such as to keep a seamless, sensible structure, and high quality content. I wasn’t prepared to just record some new V11 videos and lazily slap them on at the end.

Interestingly, I’d never heard of Lynda before…and it comes as no surprise to see they charge an arm and a leg for their courses. I could have easily cashed in and layered my pockets with green, but this was what I meant by setting a higher standard in my first post. Why limit my audience with a paywall for education that only cost me my spare time?

Video length seems to be the most common constructive critical feedback I've received. Two things to say about that. Firstly, unlike many of the courses on Lynda—which are more like tutorials or overview demos for specific tasks similar to my “tutorials” chapter—my course is a full, thorough, and complete educational course covering EVERY feature in a deceptively huge piece of software that is really the equivalent to a suite of products. I'm confident it’s not possible to significantly shorten course length without losing quality or content. Secondly, it’s not intended that anyone watch the entire course or even one of the larger chapter videos in one sitting, analogous to how you don’t watch the whole 7 season DVD boxset at once. Single videos are long because I wanted to avoid video clutter and a myriad of separate videos scattered everywhere—much like on Lynda (409 Photoshop courses, and 20,535 videos…lovely; not at all messy or bloated). The description on my website reflects this. One of the main reasons there is such a detailed time index (which, incidentally, took days of work in itself to do in a way that was also future proof), is so it can be used also as a content reference source. Want to learn about the fill tool? Search for and watch just the fill tool videos. Incidentally, the only reason I had to split chapters 2 and 4 into different parts is because YouTube imposes an arbitrary 5000 character limit on video descriptions. Only the core essentials of the software (e.g. selector tool and object handling) I’d recommend watching fully as a prerequisite. So I'm not that concerned that video length is really an issue beneath the surface.