Template Design Kit

Updated December 20th 2007

Rapid Template Design Series

Years ago I published a slap together design kit that featured 6+ hours of flash video tutorials along with some basic design elements packaged together in a free download on my old domain. After more than 1100 unique downloads in the very short time it was published I removed the kit and created the new domain you now see. However the TDK has always been a part of my primary half dozen or so products I’ve had developed for resale on other sites.

This page is really an introduction or should I say temporary introduction to what the Rapid Template Design Kit is and what it is designed to achieve. Rather than create one site to try and articulate various aspects of what I do, I simply created additional domains that I would use to categorize the larger “singled out” aspects of JaredRitchey.com

After renaming the Rapid Template Design Kit to The Rapid Template Design Series I broke up my half dozen blogs and other sites into categories starting with the creation of the domain http://www.templatedesignkit.com. I then created a place to load all of my demos for various applications I use called the “Live Demo Site” located at http://www.livedemosite.com In addition I maintain about 4 other blogs I use for writing on the subjects I like to write about in hopes of keeping informative and accurate information on the design industry presented in words I think people want to hear.

Now that the Rapid Template Design Series is in its final stages of development I’ve redesigned the site Template Design Kit to release micro versions of the kit geared specifically for WordPress, Open Realty, Joomla, and vBulletin with others soon to follow. The idea behind this is to provide a way for people to get familiar with the RTDS methods before investing into the full blown course.

Updated November 17th 2007

We had been counting on selling the RTDS on Amazon.com but prices and price fixing are common policy with Amazon and this keeps our margins at or about 5% which is simply not enough motive to maintain the printing and publishing of DVD’s and guides for sale on Amazon.

As a result we have managed to get out of our publishing contract with TCP Publishers and self publish the RTDS and its guides by simply outsourcing the DVD production and printing to local companies that provide short run production as per our requirements. Naturally this is not the IDEAL for many publishers who provide content on the web but after discussing the project with legal council and my partners its the best solution at the time.

What is the Rapid Temmplate Design Series

I’m going to restate this differently on this page as opposed to previous posts on the definition of the RTDS by articulating a few points on how it was recently updated.

One characteristic that should be understood about the RTDS is the simple fact that its a tool for use by students of design, NOT PROFESSIONALS. I stress that for one major reason;

Just one month ago (October 2007) we had selected one of our favorite internet guru and full time podcaster elite colleagues to examine the RTDS and give us some feedback as to quality, effectiveness, and completion prior to production. After his review, the one thing that popped out again was the consistent statements of critical analysis we received common with other testers. Each and every one of them made some comment to the effect that the methods of design being taught would somehow encourage students to approach design in a cut-n-paste mind set and could even encourage a lazy type of design practices that produces cookie cutter results. It was also stressed that the fact that the applications (proprietary applications) we included were excellent tools, like the code generators and such, some professionals thought that such would cause ineffective learning by reliance on such things. They are right! Students should master core elements of coding and design to have the kinds of understanding they need even when using generators. What can we do? Simple, we re evaluate!

Re-Evaluate the RTDS

No instructor wants a student to postpone learning in lieu of faster methods of doing things, but there is a happy medium to achieve both in our assessment. Today when a person tells you he or she is a professional designer and that all their code layout is done in notepad, many would tend to think that a bit arrogant and unnecessary. Given the tools that make such work faster and cleaner a professional simply doesn’t have to use those old methods and can greatly improve their productivity by stepping into the latest tools like Adobe Dreamweaver.

In addition to current design tools, professional designers or those who have been in this business for years come to rely on their snippet database and their code generators and even their lofty inventories of pre structured design elements. In the years prior to my entering the web design business, all professionals in our print industry maintained vast resources of stock design elements for use in our day to day work. Revisiting this single facet that concerns design professionals about the RTDS put me off a little since the objective was to make it a quick start kit of sorts. But as stated above the solution for us was to simply re-evaluate.

Even though we tried our best to articulate the fact that this kit or series is for students, some professionals who examined the “voice” and “methods” being taught still found enough wrong to suggest changes. Students of design do not have, in most cases; the years of experience, resources, and procedural techniques that professionals do and this series provides the foundation to get them on the right track of designing for the web. Our initial focus on this part left some core teaching aspects in the dark as we lost the “ideal image” of who are target audience was; Students of Design.

So lofty collection of resources set aside, we look now at new video scripts before we make an updated post on The Template Design Kit sometime in December which I’ll update this page with our changes. The new script will be drafted by myself this time around and narrated by either me or one of our colleagues.


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