Guerilla training for working pros

[T_Y]

There are massive numbers of people using Photoshop and Illustrator who hate Adobe because of the switch to rental software. Many are working in very fast-paced, high-pressure situations, are highly task-oriented and facing a daily stampede of deadlines. If they are to jump onto the Affinity bandwagon, they need a quick and easy way to do this without risking any delays regarding their daily workload. Setting aside a large block of time to learn a new app poses a challenge for such professionals.

 

I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator for a very long time and I can fly through tasks very quickly. While I have both Photo and Designer, as well as the Designer Workbook, in the intense rush of day-to-day business, I can’t put on the brakes and work my way through doing an entire project in a new app as it causes a huge hit in productivity. When the day is over, the thought of setting aside an additional block of time after hours is a bit much. It’s a cycle that keeps me from making the transition.

 

When Adobe cut off permanent licenses after CS6 it was a major expression of disregard for long-time users such as myself, which is why I have purchased Photo and Designer. Taking the next step of actually using the apps is a huge hurdle. I know that I am hardly alone in this. Other pros I’ve spoken with have said the same thing. It all comes down to balancing workload, impetus to switch, and avoiding burnout while changing horses midstream.

 

Having been on the creative side of marketing for a long time, I know what I would do in order to facilitate such a changeover. I would hire someone to take the ten most common tasks in Photoshop and Illustrator, create 60-second tutorials, then promote the heck out of them. After this, I would take the next ten most common tasks and repeat the above, then do the same until you have around fifty of each. Affinity already has tutorials but what someone in my situation needs is training that is quick, in-and-out, and which can be done on the fly whenever a small task comes up in the workflow; not project-stype tutorials or references to steps within projects. 

 

In an intense, high-pressure situation, the way to make inroads in prompting a transition is to provide a fast, brief and easy, guerilla-style tutorials so that the user can pull this off without blowing deadlines.

 

Examples of quick, in-and-out tasks:

– Adjust color balance and crop

– Convert text to vector logo with gradient and outline

– Open photo and save as optimized JPG / PNG

– Import vector into Photo, then add fill and stroke

– Select pixels, create a mask, and output with transparency

– Create a nested object then duplicate this on a grid

– Slice a photo for optimal web output

– Isolate a foreground object, clone the background, and output layers for parallax responsive

 

Affinity already has something similar in place. Refining this for pros in high-pressure working environments would speed adoption.