Preface
This site and its companion book, “The Digital Path,” were written by a Digital Media Design teacher at Bronx International High School for his own students, and are provided to them entirely free of charge. They are a rewrite of an earlier classroom book, “The Digital Way,” rebuilt from the ground up against the current Adobe Certified Professional exam and modern Photoshop — the original book's structure and teaching approach are preserved, but every domain, tool, and exam detail has been checked, corrected, and updated where it had gone out of date. This site and its companion book are both published online, free, for any other teacher or student who can use them.
License — Free for Educational Use (CC BY-NC 4.0–style)
You are free to copy, share, print, and adapt this site and its companion book, for any educational purpose, at no cost to anyone — on the following conditions:
- Attribution required. Credit “The Digital Path” (and the original “The Digital Way” it's built from) whenever this material or a version adapted from it is shared or reused, and keep a link back to this page where practical.
- Non-commercial only. This material may never be sold, licensed, placed behind a paywall, or otherwise used for financial profit, in whole or in part, under any circumstance.
- Always free. Anyone receiving a copy of this site or book, or a copy adapted from it, must be able to receive it at no cost.
Where This Material Comes From
Primary source
“The Digital Way” — the original Digital Media Design classroom book this site and its companion book rewrite and modernize. Its chapter structure, teaching sequence, and core teaching examples come directly from it; every domain has been checked and updated against the current exam and current Photoshop.
Exam blueprint
Adobe Certified Professional Exam Objectives — “Adobe Certified Professional in Visual Design Using Adobe Photoshop,” exam version 2025 (v26.x), published by Certiport, a business of NCS Pearson, Inc. The authoritative source for the ACP Exam Prep section's exam format, the 6 real domains, and current key terms (AI-generated content, restricted fonts, model/location releases, bit depth, gamut, histogram, and more). Always check certiport.pearsonvue.com directly for the current version rather than treating any one site as permanently up to date.
Recommended further learning
Photoshop Training Channel — a free, independent video tutorial library linked throughout the ACP Exam Prep section and the companion book for hands-on demonstrations text alone can't fully replace. Its written tools-and-toolbar reference guide, by Steve Patterson, was also used to check tool names and behavior. Two more free, independent references, pathedits.com's beginner's guide to Photoshop's tools and bwillcreative.com's tool-by-tool explainer, are credited the same way in the companion book.
Additional curriculum & reference material
- Adobe Education Exchange — publicly shared classroom curriculum (the “Advertisements” project unit) that informed this site's client-work material: design comps, team roles, and the project production-phase framework.
- U.S. Copyright Office & contemporary news coverage — Shepard Fairey v. Associated Press (2009–2011), the “Hope” poster copyright case referenced in the ACP Exam Prep section — a real, widely reported case, summarized rather than quoted from any single article.
- Adobe Color — color.adobe.com, referenced as a free tool for color-harmony exercises.
- NYC Public Schools official 2026-2027 calendar — schools.nyc.gov, the source for every real date on the pacing calendar.
About the diagrams and images on this site
Most diagrams, charts, and interface mockups on this site and in the companion book — the workspace layout, the color wheel, and most other figures — are original artwork, drawn specifically for this project. A number of figures in the companion book, clearly captioned as such, are instead real Photoshop screenshots and finished example images sourced from “The Digital Way” and this teacher's own classroom materials, used as the direct continuation of that same original work — see the companion book's own Sources & References chapter for the complete, figure-by-figure breakdown.
Third-Party Copyrighted Material & Fair Use
Some of this course's background planning drew on curriculum written by others — most notably Adobe's Adobe Education Exchange project-unit library (Business Cards, Advertisements, Brochures, Newsletters, and similar units) and select activities from Mouse.org's “Design League” program. Both are real, copyrighted works, and this site is deliberate about how it uses them:
- Referenced, not republished. Where a lesson on this site was informed by one of these sources — a project structure, a sequence of activities, a general technique like a “design comp” review cycle — the lesson itself is original writing for this class, not a copy of the source document. Facts, terminology, and pedagogical structure aren't protected by copyright; the specific wording of someone else's instructor guide is, and that wording isn't reproduced here.
- Original documents, hosted here. A handful of slide decks (Color Theory, What Is a File Format?, HTML Basics, and others, listed on the Project Library page) were written by this course's own teacher, with no third-party content in them, and are hosted directly in Resources.
- Third-party documents, not hosted here. A couple of source materials in this teacher's local files (a presentation-skills lesson and an app-wireframing template) incorporate substantial material from Mouse.org's own published curriculum. Rather than host copies of those files, this site links directly to Mouse.org's official public pages for that material and cites them as the source — nothing of theirs is copied onto this site.
- Adobe's own instructor guides are not hosted here at all. They're distributed by Adobe specifically for individual educators to download for their own classroom use, not for further redistribution, so full copies of them stay off this public site — even off any page meant only for teachers, since this is a static site with no real server-side access control (see the note on the Project Library page). The Project Library page catalogs, in this site's own original language, what those units cover and where a matching lesson already exists here, without reproducing Adobe's text.
If anything on this site should be attributed differently or removed at a rights holder's request, that correction happens immediately — reach out via the school.
The Companion Books
This site has three companion print/PDF books covering the same material in a longer, illustrated textbook format — “The Path to Design” (process, psychology, and history, no software), “Paper First” (drawing, hand-lettering, and ideation, also no software), and “The Digital Path” (the same material executed in real Photoshop, aligned to the ACP exam). See the Companion Books page to read any of them online or grab a short preview PDF.