School of Visual Concepts

This intensive 33-hour class helps users create functional and expressive typography layouts. Through a combination of hands-on learning, live instruction, and class discussions, participants explore topics like letter anatomy, word choice, sentence hierarchy, paragraph tracking, system concepts, and the artistic qualities of typography.

Learn to empower users to take full advantage of all your website’s or app’s features in this fifteen-hour beginner user experience (UX) writing course. Participants learn how to compose copy which efficiently communicates key usage points with most users. Specific topics include selecting a voice, directing users to certain functions and features, helping users recover from error messages, writing with voice command functions in mind, and synthesizing research and other UX areas into your writing.

Pivot your career path with this fifty-week user experience certificate program. Participants master necessary UX skills, build their portfolios, become certified, and make career connections. Foundational courses in this certification program include a user research overview, including research types and harvesting results, designer soft skills, such as collaboration and negotiation, and information architecture, including organizational schemes and documentation methods. Participants then move on to UX writing, interaction design, UX visual design, usability testing, and UX sketching. Instruction concludes with a capstone course, design fundamentals workshop, intensive case study, presentation skills, and a design portfolio lab.

Add the finishing touches to your UX design skills in this intermediate, 33-hour course. Instruction focuses on solving the real-world digital problems of two or more local organizations through both individual and group projects. Specific topics include developing the creative brief, setting team parameters, data collection, validating conclusions, presenting these conclusions, and developing a follow up plan.

Even as new platforms become available, Adobe Photoshop is still the industry standard. Effectively master it in this fifteen-hour basic course. Live instruction is individually tailored for students with no Photoshop experience at all or self-taught dabblers. Specific topics include sharpening, enhancing, and editing images, layers, channels, masks, paths, typography, image consolidation, vectors vs. bitmaps, and automating workflow.

Get to know Adobe Illustrator in this 15-hour beginner class. Instead of photographs, participants use images and vector shapes to create website designs, posters, advertisements, and other commercial artworks. Specific topics include differentiating between photographs and vector graphics, organizing your workflow, using some common Illustrator tools, incorporating text, and adding live effects.

Master some fundamental design concepts in this 33-hour beginner course. These design concepts, which are a necessary component of all digital and printed art, include shape, hierarchy, proportion, scale, and layout. Through a combination of non-computer hands-on learning, live instruction, and class discussion, students explore topics like grid layouts, eye-guiding techniques, incorporating design concepts into your artwork, and adding illustrations, photographs, and images.

This beginner-level, six-hour workshop teaches participants how to write engaging copy which adds value to readers. Such copy pulls potential customers to your site and significantly improves your SERP rankings. Specific topics include outlining techniques, DIY creative briefs, identifying your best and most persuasive argument, writing self-evaluation rules, and resources for further exploration.

Learn to incorporate motion and animation into your web video, app, website, or VR experience in this six-hour intermediate course. Timeline-based design is much different from other graphic design areas, but it is not that difficult to master. And, the rewards are more than worthwhile. Specific course topics include motion design fundamentals, the synthesis of motion design, UX and interactive design, timing, interpolating, animation styles, and animation tools.

Take your UX writing skills to the next level in this three-hour intermediate course. Words are just as important as images, and this fast-paced workshop makes you a better UX wordsmith, based on voice charts and usability principles. Through a combination of class discussions, live instruction, and hands-on learning, participants examine subjects like leveraging business and UX principles to improve writing results, applying usability criteria to select the right words, improving existing text, using the right voice for new text, making targeted improvements, and getting other stakeholders on board.