Ok, so as someone that walked this path and is currently on the other end as a freelance graphic and web designer, i'll put out a brain dump.

# Development

1. For web development, you'll find tons of best practices (i.e. alistapart, smashingmag, diveintohtml5, etc). This is the easy part, you can browse these or skim them whenever you get bored. HTML is pretty straightforward, but css is a bit trickier.

1.5. An too-long aside on css. CSS is one of the most important things to try to master as you actually start implementing design. CSS is pretty gross, it's alright and not that difficult, but it's gross and it's nearly always a mess. There are lots of frameworks around that try to remedy this, but i recommend that you actually try to figure much of it out before you start adopting frameworks. Similarly, before you use a css reset, you should actually try doing some work without them (the big problem is that each browser's default css is rendered inconsistently, so you make some assumption about webkit and find that opera and mozilla think you're a fool).

EXERCISE ZERO: try to see if you actually understand a) the box model and b) floats and c) positioning. These are the trickiest things. You can only really understand these if you try to figure out how you would use any of these things in practice. I put up a page with some stuff about those topics when i was teaching a web design class recently: http://risd.generic.cx/review.html

# Design

2. Learn typography. This is a long process. I don't even know how to explain it correctly, but the most important thing is that you become incredibly sensitive to typography. Look at stuff around you, think about what's happening; be critical: ask what about something is successful and if not, why? Don't be an ass. The first year that you're really getting into typography, you'll see bad kerning or questionable typography everywhere and you'll annoy the hell out of your friends, it's usually best to keep these observations to yourself unless you're geeking out with other type nerds.

EXERCISE ONE: make it a goal of yours to take a photo each day of type somewhere in your environment. This isn't very hard, but it gets you looking I just did it: https://twitter.com/nsfmc/status/21232532041

3. Learn some art-history. You don't have to learn very much, but the more your learn, the more you'll have a grounding in what has been seen/done/discussed/etc. Most importantly, you will be able to be eloquent about form/aesthetics that you like. It is hard to talk about visual things, so in this way, it is imperative to have a good set of words when talking about form. A few great books: Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, Reyner Banham's Theory & Design in the First Machine Age, Rosalind Krauss' Passages in Modern Sculpture.

4. Make things. this is perhaps the most important thing. Make things and be critical of them. it is difficult to be critical of things you make, so the corollary of this is that you should surround yourself with people smarter than you and that are better designers than you. talk to them about what you're doing, the worst thing you can do is work in a bubble (this is true in programming as well, c.f. the myth of the genius programmer [motgp])

5. There are some books you can look at, i would probably recommend the following: Armin Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual, Emil Ruder's Typographie: a manual of design, Josef Mueller-Brockman's Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style. Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type and John Kane's Type Primer are good intro resources. Also, these are interesting books: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joekral/sets/72157594264845751/... With the Hofmann and Ruder and Lupton books, try to do the exercises with basic form and type studies, don't just look at all the pretty things they make.

6. Develop your taste: nobody is going to tell you what to like and when you're working with a client, you should be pushing for the union of what you like and what they need. This is impossible if you have no taste or if you have no idea what you like. It's possible to have diverse tastes, but you should start developing the things you like and things you do not. Try to rationalize your taste and be critical of why you dislike things, this will help you in critiquing your own work. Your taste and your individual style will define the work you do as a designer.

EXERCISE TWO: Offer to redesign your friends' blogs. All of them. Blogs are great examples of typography, hierarchy, systems, and generalized design at its best. An added bonus, most blogs are not incredibly complex, tumblr, i'm looking at you :)

7. Look at five or six of your favorite things that you've made. What can you tell from this? what do you see? Do you like grids? (i do!) Do you keep using one font over and over again? Do you fall back on certain things? Do they all appear to be yours. This is sort of designer as auteur, but it's good to look at yourself and see what you're doing collectively from time to time.

8. Always try to make whatever you do better. It's easy to stop and say "sure, that looks fine" but it's more challenging to push something further in different directions. This is an uncomfortable process because often you don't know what you're doing when you step out of your comfort zone. Keep working, you'll either discover things that don't work (useful discoveries!) or things which are inappropriate. it's easy to become complacent, avoid it at all costs.

9. Really, i can't stress this enough: learn and practice and do your best to be a good typographer. Typography is the one thing that sets apart the field of graphic design. Design is many things, but it nearly always includes the use of letters to communicate. If you're on the web, you're probably not using hand-drawn type, so you can focus on using foundry type in novel and creative ways. Really, focus on typography.

10. Some current magazines and things i like to look at: Dot Dot Dot is always a good read and is tangentially design related. their DDDG compilation book is great. Baseline magazine is always worth a read and always has fantastically written articles. Eye magazine is equally fantastic. I look at graphic hug [graphichug.com] all the time, it's up there with swissmiss[http://www.swiss-miss.com/], under consideration [http://www.underconsideration.com/] and but does it float [http://butdoesitfloat.com/]

Sorry, this went on really long, but there's really a ton to learn if you want to go the traditional rout. If i look back on this post, i'd say take a gander at the books listed and the periodicals and make stuff and learn as much as you can by being critical of yourself and things you see.

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p.s. Don't be a mean typographer when a friend makes something with papyrus or comic sans, at least they were unafraid to make something they thought was beautiful. Having taste is ok, being a cruel snob is not ok.

[motgp]: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusPro...