The Power of Training & Why are we called “Noble” Desktop?

Full Video Transcript

David: Welcome back to CreativePro Conversations. I'm David Blatner, president of CreativePro, and I have with me today Dan Rodney from Noble Desktop. Dan, it's such a joy to see you here.

Dan: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to see you again and to chat. It has been too long.

David: Before we get into the topic of today's discussion, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with Noble Desktop.

Dan's Background and Noble Desktop's History

Dan: My name is Dan Rodney and I've been with Noble Desktop since about 2000, so I came on here about 23 years ago. Noble Desktop's been around since 1990. We were one of the earliest computer training centers in New York City and have seen a lot of competitors come and go over the years. I came on after they were open for about 10 years and just started teaching part-time. Eventually this became a full-time thing for me. I was mainly focused on teaching in the beginning but got into doing course development, creating classes, and just taking on a bigger role within the company.

So I'm our lead curriculum developer, director of the school, and a lead trainer here. I work with a lot of our other instructors in helping them create courses as well as teach them. We teach individuals, so we have open enrollment classes, and then we also do a lot of corporate training as well where companies will hire us for in-person training, online training, or to travel to go to their location.

From Local Training Center to Global Reach

David: Noble is one of these companies that I've heard about for literally decades now. It used to be like if you live anywhere around New York City you have to know about Noble Desktop. But now it's beyond New York City—now you're global, right? You're doing online training and you have people coming from where?

Dan: All over. Certainly because we're based in New York City we have a lot of people in the tri-state area here that travel and like to come in person. I know a lot of other training centers have gone exclusively online, but we're still doing in-person classes here and I can't imagine we'd stop doing in-person classes.

Even before the pandemic when people were starting to migrate towards online, we started doing online training in addition to our in-person. We'd allow people to join the in-person live classes and we'd have a few people here and there. With the pandemic we had to switch to 100% online, but as soon as we could get back to in-person, we like to allow people to be in person. Some people like the in-person experience, some people can't travel to New York City to take the training, so we let them join in live online as well.

People from all different countries can join in now. Obviously it's Eastern time so they might have a time zone shift to deal with, but people from all over the US are joining online, people from other countries, and some people travel from other countries even to come take our class and get a trip to New York City out of it too.

David: I believe it. I think that's a great idea—you get some training, go see a Broadway show, do some fun at night and learn some stuff during the day. Perfect.

The Range of Training Topics

David: So what are you training in? In the old days it was just layout stuff like Quark XPress and Photoshop, but now it seems like Noble does everything. You're covering so much ground.

Dan: We do tend to focus on still design and coding type technology stuff. In the beginning it was a lot of Adobe software, Quark XPress, but we also got very early into doing web development. Back then it was just HTML—there was no CSS out there yet. But of course web development's grown a lot since then, so now we do full stack from front end to backend web development: coding HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

We still do the design stuff, all the Adobe apps, which we've expanded. We started with things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark XPress at the time. I was a big proponent of switching to InDesign as soon as possible. I'm still amazed that Quark XPress is still around—some people still use it—but I'm a big believer in InDesign.

Then we expanded into motion graphics: Premiere Pro for video editing, After Effects for video effects. We also teach Adobe Audition for doing audio editing, so if you want to clean up audio, do podcasting, edit those types of things.

Data Science and Emerging Fields

Dan: On the coding side we've also gotten into things like data science and data analytics, which are really big. That's a newer area that's still very up-and-coming and growing. Things like data visualization with Tableau—you can create interactive visualizations. Instead of just creating a static pie chart, you want to actually interact with that data and do stuff in the browser instead of just looking at a pretty chart. Tableau lets you do data visualization that's interactive.

We also do things like PowerPoint as well. I know some designers don't like PowerPoint, but that's a niche that some people are just PowerPoint designers. It's actually an underrated niche—if you're okay using PowerPoint, it could do a lot more than I think people give it credit for. If you're a good designer with PowerPoint, there's business opportunities there.

David: I completely agree. We've been doing more and more PowerPoint stuff through CreativePro Week and our online events, and it is mind-blowing what is possible. I totally agree.

Why "Noble" Desktop?

David: I have to ask a very important question: why Noble? Why is it Noble Desktop?

Dan: So the story is that the founder of Noble Desktop, his name is Scott Carson, he was doing some part-time teaching at colleges and wanted to create his own classes that he could offer. There were a lot of competitors out there at the time that were just doing shady business practices. He just honestly wanted to provide a good, noble service, and so that's why he called it Noble Desktop.

For example, a lot of training centers will just schedule tons of dates, most of which those classes never run. You might see like they're teaching that course every single week, but they're not—they might run 20% of those. So you might register for a week and then "oh, we're not running that class, can you come back in a month from now when we're actually running the class?"

We try not to do that. When we list a course date we try to run that reliably. But a lot of training centers will just list a bunch of dates and hope that they get somebody and then try to put them all in the same week. He didn't want to do those kinds of tricks—he wanted to create a better experience that was truthful, honest, noble. So that's why it's called Noble Desktop.

David: I love that. I had no idea. I always figured there must be some technical reason or someone named Noble, but it literally is a noble experience working with Noble Desktop. The result worked because Noble became known not just for good content—which, absolutely, for good content—but also just for a good experience, for a good relationship that went over and over. People would go over and over again.

We've sent people here at CreativePro to some of the Noble online classes. They were live events, in-classroom live, but our folks attended remotely, and really good results. Just really good content.

Online vs. In-Person Training

David: I'm curious about that difference: the in-person experience versus the in-person but watching online versus just online. A lot of people these days are like "I'll just do it through LinkedIn Learning or YouTube." What's the difference in all that?

Dan: I think it depends on your goals of what you're learning and whether you're new to an area or not. I've certainly learned a lot through YouTube and watching video tutorials, reading blog posts. But if you're getting started in an application or in a new career area, there's a lot of stuff to learn and you don't have the context to judge what's good and what's not.

You can waste a lot of hours going through endless YouTube videos, some of which they know what they're talking about, some of which they don't. I've watched tutorials where I'm like "this person is teaching the wrong thing and I wish they wouldn't be teaching this this way."

David: Yeah, yeah.

The Value of Structured Learning

Dan: It can sometimes be a waste of time trying to find the right things. Also you watch this advanced tutorial that blows your mind and you're like "oh, I'm not ready for that," and you got to try to find another thing. So the progression of starting somebody off from beginning to middle to end, ramping them up with a nice slow understanding that we don't overwhelm them too quickly with things that confuse somebody and make them feel uncomfortable—to ease them in and make them feel confident as they're coming in and learning from the beginning—is something that we really strive for.

We make sure that we have a good onboarding through the end process, that we don't ramp up too quickly and confuse people and make them not feel confident in what they're doing. When you watch tutorials without that nice ramp up, you can learn, but it's a time investment. Sometimes people get discouraged. I think that's one big difference in terms of just watching pre-recorded videos or finding YouTube stuff.

Once you have a base, if I want to learn a new thing, if I want to add a new skill, I can go on, but I have more context at that point. So I think especially for newer learners it helps to have a guided experience where there's more of a course instead of just individual lessons here and there which they have to try to connect the pieces. It's hard for new people to connect many different pieces that are made by different people.

The Importance of Live Interaction

David: That totally makes sense. The other piece though, even if you're further along, the ability to connect with another person and ask questions, go deeper into something—it seems like all of that would be really helpful as well.

Dan: Yeah, whether it's live online like we do or in person—and when we do a hybrid class we have some people live online and some people in person—you can ask questions. If you get stuck, when you're in a YouTube video tutorial you can ask your monitor but it's not going to answer you back. You could type into the chat and put a comment there, but the person may never respond because they're not being paid to respond. A lot of times there's tons of comments and they just get ignored. That could be frustrating as a new learner.

It's a time investment. You have to view your time as money, and if you want to learn it quicker in a more dedicated, thorough, start-to-finish approach, that's where courses make more sense than watching random different tutorials.

Current Trends in Training

David: So you're covering all this different ground—After Effects and data visualization and coding. What's the focus? What's popular? What are people doing? Are people still doing InDesign sessions?

Dan: It's interesting. Programs that have been around for over 30 years—Photoshop has been around basically as long as we've been in business—people are still learning Photoshop, which is amazing. So you have standards that are just always useful and people are always learning them. That doesn't mean there's more people learning Photoshop than other things, but those are still popular apps that people are still using and learning.

As far as things that are more trendy and current right now, Figma is one. As far as topics go, there's video editing and motion graphics because designers that are used to doing still design, if they want to expand their skills and kind of learn the next thing, why not add motion and animation? Especially with online video these days being more and more important for promotional stuff, doing ads and social media. Animated graphics, whether they be animated GIFs or videos—so that's popular.

Digital marketing and social media marketing as well. If people are doing design stuff and they want to add the marketing side of things, thinking "hey, instead of just telling me to do this graphic, why don't I help you in your social media marketing?" We also teach social media marketing, so that could be useful to do it for clients as well as to do it for yourself as a design business.

The Rise of Figma

David: I'm curious about Figma only because somebody recently said "David, why aren't you into Figma? It's a page layout app. It does the same thing like PowerPoint, InDesign, and Figma—they're all about aggregating content and setting up relationships among the various objects on the page." I'm like "oh, you're right, it's like InDesign for digital." That's a new way of thinking of it for me. Is that something you've been into? Is that your world?

Dan: Yeah, definitely. I've done traditional print design, I've done digital design. When I was in college I did an internship at a web design studio and they taught me how to do hand coding back in 1997. I know you've done other types of coding—I remember you talking about PostScript coding—so I learned coding from an early standpoint.

Over the years I've used Photoshop to do web design, then ImageReady came out and ImageReady was like the web version of Photoshop, then they migrated the stuff back in. Then I used Macromedia Fireworks before Adobe bought them and killed them. I had to grieve the death of Fireworks because I was sad—that was a great app.

David: It was awesome.

Dan: Even though not a lot of people used it, the people that used it—it was a great app. It could create animated GIFs better than anything else, it had onion skinning, it was awesome. But then I went back to Photoshop, then Sketch came out and I started using Sketch.

Adobe XD vs. Figma

Dan: Then Adobe XD came out. Of course I was thinking "well, this is Adobe, building the Creative Cloud, this is something I was really betting on." I thought who's gonna bet against Adobe here? And now that we're seeing something from them—it took a while for it to become good enough for professional use. I think Adobe kind of jumped the gun in terms of trying to say "hey, this is good enough for people to use professionally" when it wasn't quite ready yet.

People came to it and said "this isn't good enough," and it kind of tarnished the initial adoption because they kind of rushed people into using it when it wasn't quite ready. Then when it got to the point where it was good, it was like "hey, please come back and take a look at us now that we're out of beta." It had an initial tarnished reputation and they had to try to get people back. It did get good at that point, but for some people they were kind of turned off by the beta, even though it wasn't really meant for professional use. I think that might have hurt them with a little bit of a false start.

David: They had already gone to Figma, right? They discovered Figma.

Dan: Yeah, a lot of people were using Figma, especially because Sketch was Mac only and Figma was web-based so you could use it. To be honest, my first approach to Figma when I first started using it, I was like "this seems like a clunkier version of Adobe XD." I didn't think it was quite as user-friendly. I thought actually XD was the most user-friendly initially.

But once I got into Figma I realized that even though I didn't like the interface quite as much, it was definitely a more powerful app. Once I got used to it, that became my main app. And then surprise, surprise—Adobe announced "we're done with XD and now we're going to try to buy Figma." We'll see how that acquisition goes. It's been over a year and I know Europe is still doing an investigation to see how that's going to all operate.

But Figma's kind of won in the end as far as the market goes. I'll be interested to see how Adobe integrates that. For sure Figma is a great app, it's really powerful. But of course it is for digital design, so while you can use it for kind of static graphics, its main use is designing websites and apps and interactive type things.

Learning More About Noble Desktop

David: It totally makes sense, and I think people need to be learning about all of those tools. If only there were a place to learn about these tools! We're not doing Figma stuff at all with CreativePro—I'm so glad that Noble Desktop is touching that, is getting into that world and helping people with onboarding. How do people learn more about the Noble Desktop experience? How do people learn about what you're doing, when you're doing it? There's the website of course, nobledesktop.com, right? What else is there?

Dan: Certainly you can go on to our website and check out things, but we also have a YouTube channel. I and some other people at Noble Desktop have done a bunch of live streams in the past where we recorded those, and on our YouTube channel—which you can either go to YouTube and search for Noble Desktop, or on our website if you go down to the footer we have a link to YouTube—we have a lot of intro tutorials kind of going over different industries.

If you're interested in video editing, if you're interested in motion graphics, or coding websites, you can check those out. They're between one and two hours, live streams. They're not pre-made tutorials—they're start to finish, just us talking, kind of having a conversation like this, showing how to do things, giving examples of what can be done. Some of them have software demonstrations as well.

If you want to see if this is something you're interested in, what's going on in this industry or this app, you can check out some of those live streams. That's a great way to get a taste of what things are like. It's different than the pace of an in-person hands-on class because all of our classes that you pay for are hands-on where you're going to get your hands on the application and use it yourself. Those live streams are obviously not meant to be hands-on training, so the pace is a little different, but it's a great way to see "hey, I'm interested in this, let me get a sample and see if this is something I want to learn more about."

The Joy of Teaching

David: I love that. We will also put a link in the show notes for this video so that people can follow that along as well. This is really helpful, Dan. I really appreciate you taking the time to give us a sense of what Noble Desktop is all about, where it came from, why it came about, the underlying values of the organization which I think is so important, and all the stuff you're doing these days. It's very impressive and it's such a help in the community. I appreciate you taking a little time to tell us about that.

Dan: Well, thank you for having me on. This is something that we like to do. For me, I'm a designer-coder type person and that's my background, so I just love teaching other people and sharing it and getting people into this industry and helping them change careers, change their lives, or get better at their job. It's just a fun thing to do.

I'm sure you know—you've taught many things, so I know you know the feeling, the joy of teaching and sharing your knowledge with other people. It's a great thing that we can do and I just love doing it. I think that shows in that we've been around for over 30 years.

David: It totally shows—the love of training, the love of teaching. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here, this is great.

Dan: Thanks for having me. Take care.