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Interview with Ionut Ciursa of PSDBURN

by TutsArena - Articles

Ionut is a talented designer who has written numerous Photoshop tutorials for many well known websites in the design community. His work has been featured on websites such as Tutorial9 and PSDTUTS+. He caught our eye a few months ago and he hasn’t stopped impressing us since.

Thanks for doing this interview. Can you start off by telling our readers a little about yourself and your design background?

Hi, my name is Ionut Ciursa, and I am a self taught 17 year old designer from Romania. I love everything creative and I’ve been passionate about design since a friend of mine told me about this amazing powerful program called Photoshop.

Can you tell us a little bit about your blog, PSDBurn, and how it all got started?

Sure. I’ll try to keep this story as short as possible. At the beginning of high school, when I started to become more interested in designing, I created my first blog, where I was writing Photoshop tutorials in my native language, Romanian. After a while I created an English version of this blog as an experiment, and someone from Good-Tutorials.com, who is now a good friend of mine, saw those tutorials and hired me to write some for him. After a year from the launch of my first blog, I closed it and I decided that I want to write only in English.

I continued to write Photoshop tutorials for my friend and at the beginning of 2009 I launched my second blog, PSDBURN. Then I wrote a tutorial for one of the biggest Photoshop blogs, Tutorial9, and soon I had requests from other bloggers to write for them too.

I never thought I was going to write Photoshop tutorials on sites like PSDTUTS+, Tutorial9, Six Revisions or Photoshop Lady. I wasn’t even thinking that I can make money working in Photoshop. At the beginning it was just my old computer, my copy of Photoshop, my passion and my desire to experiment and learn new things.

Is design something that you’ve always been interested in? How long have you been doing it?  How did you get started?

I started to become interested in design about four years ago when I heard about Photoshop for the first time from a friend of mine. After I got a copy of this program I started to experiment. At that time there were not so many Photoshop tutorials written in my native language and the only way I could learn something new was to start reading English tutorials (something that was a little bit difficult for me back then).

When I got to high school I had to make magazines, posters and presentations for a lot of projects. I was always asked to do all these kind of works and this helped me a lot to improve my skills and try new things. From here to my first clients it was just a small step.

Where do you find your inspiration to create new designs and write new tutorials?

I usually get inspired by the works of other designers, music and nature. Sometimes when I can’t find any inspiration for my tutorials I try to find other designers to collaborate with. The results have been pretty amazing so far.

Can you name a few of your favorite designers and tell us why they are your favorite?

My favorite designers are two guys from Romania – Constantin Potorac and Alex Beltechi.

Constantin was writing tutorials for PSDTUTS+ when I was still in the process of learning more about Photoshop. The fact that was living in a city near mine and that he succeeded to become a well known designer inspired me a lot. I followed him on the internet, read his tutorials and after I launched PSDBURN, I even got the chance to collaborate with him.

Alex is another great designer from Romania. I love his style and his tutorials are always a great source to learn new techniques in Photoshop.

What are your favorite design websites to visit?

1. Tutorial9 – this blog helped me a lot to start my freelance career;
2. PSDTUTS – awesome Photoshop tutorials; so far I wrote two tutorials here in collaboration with Constantin Potorac;
3. Six Revisions – useful articles and tutorials for web designers and developers;
4. Photoshop Lady – a great website to find high quality Photoshop tutorials;
5. deviantArt – the best place on the web for inspiration; also a great place for me to find other designers to collaborate with;
6. design-newz.com – daily news from the design community;
7. From The Couch – online video show hosted by the guys who designed the WordPress theme I use on my blog.

What are your plans for the future for both yourself and your blog?

Well, my last high school year is about to begin and I don’t think I will have time to continue working on PSDBURN. A Photoshop blog takes a lot of time to update and unfortunately I won’t have that time for about a year. Right now I’m considering selling my blog. So, if someone from here is interested in purchasing PSDBURN, he can feel free to contact me.

I’m not thinking about disappearing completely from the internet for one year. I will still try to write some tutorials on other blogs, but not that often. I also want to write an e-book with Photoshop tutorials. However, the e-book is still in the process of planning, but I think I will finish it pretty soon.

Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview. Do you have any final words of advice for eager designers?

Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure to do my first interview with you, Alan.

For all the upcoming designers: try to always follow your passion, focus on what’s important for you and don’t give up. Continue to experiment, learn and try new things every day. Also, when someone criticizes your design, don’t take it personal. Learn how to appreciate criticism and how to use it to become a better designer.