Prepping for SVG Animations in Web design - becoming Adobe Certified

So I started this blog when I got stuck on pseudo-elements and I wanted to share all the amazing things you can do with them (I have an article dropping soon on making responsive tables with pseudo-elements.) but after I overcame my pseudo-elements. The next thing for me was going to be using SVG elements to create even more beautiful and specific animations.

In order to get very good at SVGs. I needed to get good at a vector illustration software. I chose Adobe Illustrator and I chose uCertify as the platform to teach me. Getting good at Illustrator isn't an easy task but uCertify really helped codify the learning process.

If you don't know what uCertify is an online learning platform that offers courses, test prep, simulator, and virtual labs to prepare for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, CompTIA, CIW, Adobe, PMI, ISC2, Linux, and many more certification exams. These prep-kits come with the comprehensive study guide and interactive activities.

Now most of you coming here have already used sites like udemy and the likes to learn one skill or another and so have I and they're great but there was a reason (well a few reasons now) I chose uCertify for this particular skillset.

The Breakdown

First Reason you'll love uCertify: Learning is something that you can do in your spare time and in the little pockets of time you have during the day.

Once you log-in and choose your course from the dashboard, you're taken to the course homepage.

Pre-Assessment

I mean I can't explain how useful this is. It's great to help you gauge what level you're at before you start learning. Using this I figured out the areas I was strong at (so I could skip them) and the areas I didn't know enough about. Plus, research shows that trying to solve a problem before you know how, increases the likelihood of you retaining what you have learned down the line.

Chapters & Lessons

There's 7 chapters split across two parts. Remember, when I said uCertify is excellent for when you're busy? After finding out the areas, you're good at and being able to skip them. It has a great feature called 'bite-size learning' which does exactly what it says.

Practice Tests 

The course offers 122 exercises and quizzes to really test your knowledge. These questions will also come in handy when taking standardised tests or applying for Adobe certification.

There are a few ways of doing the quizzes. First is getting feedback on every question. This is a good way to check your answer and directly get a feedback about the answer, including which chapter it relates in the material list. The second way is a normal test just like in the pre-assessment and the last one is for review only, so it will show the answer directly and you can learn from each questions. After ending the test, there's a progress report showing your scores just like in the pre-assessment.

Post Assessment

The final indicator of your learning and readiness. This is to be completed after you've done all of the practice test sets with a score of at least 70% to receive certificate of completion.

If that didn't convince you

A great thing about the Adobe Illustrator lessons was that even before we went into learning about Illustrator, the first lesson was focused on understanding design principles (I hear a lot about 'beautiful code' but very little of the tutorials I've used have ever introduced the concept of what makes code 'beautiful' and such). It may not be a game changer but it's good to know why you're doing what you're doing.

In Conclusion

I'm happy with this prep kit. uCertify has done a great job on preparing students to prepare themselves to not only understand Illustrator and design principles but to also get Adobe certified (when I thought about writing this review I was very upset at the incessant focus with things I considered trivial information until I discovered those questions are actually routinely asked on Adobe certification exams and even Upwork).

uCertify is great if you're aiming to get your certification or you just want to expand your knowledge like me. Look forward to my next entry in the Playing with Pseudo-elements series and all the amazing SVG animations I will be doing shortly.

The link to the Adobe Illustrator class I'm currently taking is below;

https://www.ucertify.com/exams/Adobe/illustrator-cc.html

Thanks for reading