With the recent success of the sarcastic and definitely NSFW (not safe for work) You Suck at Photoshop tutorials that have made the Internet rounds, I’ve noticed a lot of people are trying to make their own design software tutorials to share on YouTube.

Search on any design app and you’ll find lots of tutorials from designers. What can you teach?

The trouble is that many of the design software videos people are creating and posting on YouTube are pretty low quality because of some common mistakes. I’ve even seen one done with a video camera propped near the screen instead of a screen capture application. Yikes. Which brings us to item one of how to create your own design tutorials…

1) Get a screencasting application. Screencasting is simply taking a screenshot as a movie rather than a still, and can be done with applications like Snapz Pro, iShowU, Wink, and Camtasia. VersionTracker.com is a great source for these programs. Usage varies by application, but the general idea is that you define the area you wish to “shoot,” press start, record your motions (and audio if desired), and save it. Simple!

2) Set up your screen. As much as it pains you, change your desktop background to white, black, gray, or other neutral tone so it doesn’t distract from your video. Open the application you wish to demonstrate (like Photoshop or Illustrator) and group all of the tools and panels you need into the smallest area possible. Consider any menus that will open during your work and make sure there is room for them in the screen area you will shoot. Whenever possible, avoid shooting your entire screen, focusing only on the part that you’re using. Remember that YouTube videos are pretty small, so you want viewers to see as much detail as possible.

3) Prep and practice. If your video will be fairly complex, such as demonstrating the creation of a composite photograph with lots of selections and precise placements, jot a list of items that you wish to cover. Keep it close to your screen so you can refer to it. If you’re recording audio during the process, have a script written. You won’t likely be able to refer to the script while you shoot (you’ll be busy enough making all your mouse motions), so be sure to practice it a few times.

4) Keep videos short and relevant. Unless you are familiar with video editing and have an application to manage that, the “takes” that you do in your screencasting app may be all you have. By keeping videos short, you won’t have to worry about editing them later to fit YouTube’s time constraints or to cut out extraneous mouse movements or babbling. The best tip for keeping your video concise is to start it with some basic work already done—for example, if you want to demonstrate a cool layout idea in Dreamweaver, you might begin with the page already created and some of the simple layout components set, so you can focus your video on the interesting details that would be most useful and relevant to viewers. This is also important because YouTube is already jam-packed with video tutorials—show viewers something new and handy, and you’ll stand out.

5) Edit if you can. If you are competent with video editing applications (like iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or Avid), which I am certainly not, use what you know to polish your screencast. Speed up slow, boring tasks, add text or images to help point out important items, and bring in a separate audio track. This last item is particularly helpful because it can be awfully tricky to get your audio and video right in a single take.

Most importantly, accept that this is a real trial and error process requiring a lot of preparation and takes. But the results can be great—you can share your unique techniques with designers everywhere, and you’ll likely receive comments on your video thanking you for your great tips!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.