We’re very passionate about teaching creative skills here at Tuts+, so over the last year we’ve been planning a new stream of educational content focused on the “Why?” instead of the “How”. Today we’re unveiling the newest addition to the Tuts+ family: Creative Sessions.
Every month we’ll be running a two week ‘Session’ on a creative topic. Our first Session, beginning today, is on Character Illustration, and future Sessions will be on varied topics like interface design, illustrative typography and creative freelancing. Unlike regular Tuts+ content, Sessions content is more theoretical, opinion based and will often cross many disciplines.
Depending on the Session, each specific article will fit into one of our ten educational sites (including FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome). So they will be published on the appropriate site, while our central site Sessions.tutsplus.com/Creative will provide the hub for each Session. There you will be able to track each Session, grab the monthly wallpaper, participate in a community project, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow CS on Twitter and give feedback (or praise!) for the Session.
Sessions is a bit of a new take on teaching online and is one we hope will be really successful. It’s going to really take advantage of the increasing diversity of our Tuts+ network, meaning that for example we could have a session on web design that might have a ‘freelance web design’ post on FreelanceSwitch, a ‘build a web design’ post on Nettuts+, a ‘optimize a web design for the iphone’ on the upcoming Mobiletuts+ and much more!
Because it’s so new, you can expect to see us tweak and improve the model over the next year or so. The content is all free, and like the rest of Tuts+ will remain so. At some point we’ll investigate adding either a bit of premium content to each Session or possibly extended courses for subscribers to help pay for it all!
Finally each Session will feature cover artwork by a talented designer or illustrator. The artwork will be downloadable as a wallpaper and will help give each of our Sessions a bit of personality!
Session 1: Character Illustration
Sessions is already bubbling with activity. You can download a gorgeous desktop wallpaper by Ryan Putnam (Rype), take part in our ‘Create an Antihero’ community project, or dive straight into the fully-illustrated Principles of Cute Character Design by Sascha Preuss, exclusive to Creative Sessions.
Advertising: FusionAds
Our Creative Sessions hub-site displays only one ad on every page – an excellent opportunity for your product to cut through the noise and reach its target market. Create a campaign with FusionAds to be seen on Creative Sessions and many other high quality creative sites.
If you’d like to advertise elsewhere on the Tuts+ network, we are big fans of BuySellAds and you can purchase ad spots by heading over and searching for your favourite site!
I like the wallpaper idea and agree that it truly adds a unique touch to the sessions. I’ll definitely look forward to the next educational posts.