Design Video Tutorials

Design skills refer to the broad range of skills that create the visual elements that organizations and companies utilize to communicate with mass audiences. This will range from product packaging and logos to awareness campaigns and entertainment. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning design. These videos give students control over their learning pace and allow them to prioritize the skills they want to train in. In addition, since they are low in cost, they are an excellent place for new students to begin experimenting with new design tools. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

What is Design?

Design is an incredibly broad category of skills that refers to utilizing computers to assist in visual communication. This can range from simple graphic design work such as photo manipulation or print layout design to complex 3D animation projects or interactive digital interface design work. Visual and graphic design is vital to any product release, information campaign, rhetorically-effective communication strategy, or web design project. No matter what kind of work is being done, if it intends to communicate with a mass audience, specialized design skills will be needed to make that communication possible.

The tools utilized by Designers are varied, and each tends to have its own niche functionality that differs from project to project. For example, photographers will use photo manipulation tools like Photoshop and Lightroom, Layout Designers will use tools like InDesign and Figma, and Motion Graphic Designers will use After-Effects, Cinema 4D, and Premiere Pro. Rather than learning and mastering every design tool available, Designers will specialize in specific elements of the design process and learn those tools. This makes design a highly varied field to enter, and it offers students a great opportunity to both experiment with different programs and turns their passions into a creative career.

Read more about what design is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Design?

As a creative form of visual expression, the things you can do with design are largely limited only by your imagination and the number of programs you are willing to learn. Users can design vibrant and evocative visual compositions ranging from simple logos, photo manipulations, and posters to complex 3D animations and digital web assets. Almost every professional field employs designers to ensure that their output looks the way they intend it to look and communicates the ideas they want. This is true of both the private and public sectors, given that design tools are just as important in persuasive and advocacy contexts as in commercial and advertising contexts.

Learning design skills is also a great way to build your profile and brand online. Online content creators need to set themselves apart from the crowd, and learning to make vibrant visual designs is a perfect way to do so. Whether this is about producing a logo for your website, designing recognizable branding for the products on your Etsy store, or editing and manipulating video content, learning design skills can improve your creative output. Design skills are also at the center of several different emerging online art and activism movements. Learning design skills can give creatives many mediums to produce rhetorical compelling advocacy content like infographics, digital documentaries, and docu-games.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning Design?

Video tutorials are ideal for new students to enter the design world. Utilizing video tutorials will give students a great deal of control over their learning pace and the style and focus of their training, with the added benefit of being relatively cost-effective relative to formal training. While students looking to use design tools professionally will still need advanced skills training, these tutorials are a great place to start.

The most essential advantage of video tutorials is the level of control they give students. Videos can be paused, rewound, sped up, or moved on from the viewer's whim, meaning that students aren’t locked into a set time frame or fixed schedule of courses. This makes them perfect for students with work or family commitments that prevent them from enrolling in a training course immediately.

Another advantage of video tutorials is that they are fairly low commitment, meaning that students aren’t locked into a single video once they start learning a new skill. Given that design is such an expansive skill set, many students may not know where they want to begin, and using videos to explore all of your options is a great way to address this concern. Students can watch a few Illustrator videos and either choose to continue learning that skill or watch some videos on After Effects.

Finally, videos offer students the chance to prioritize the kinds of skills they will be learning. Many video tutorials are very short, targeted lessons that teach students how to work on specific aspects of a design. Video tutorials allow students to opt to hyper-focus their early training on the skills they want to learn. This makes them ideal for students who know what kinds of projects that they want to be working on and need to quickly pick up specific, essential skills.

Types of Design Videos

The most immersive type of design video is a tutorial that mimics the structure of an online training seminar and gives students a feel for the kinds of work they will do in a professional learning environment. Noble Desktop provides students with several free training resources in almost every design tool you would want to learn. First, students must find out what design training they want to pursue. To help with this, Noble offers a Getting Started in Design seminar in which students can learn the differences between graphic design, visual design, UX/UI, and motion graphics design and learn what kind of tools and applications each subfield utilizes. This will allow students to make more informed decisions about the kinds of training that they want, after which they can visit Noble’s free seminars page to explore the options available for the specific skill set they want to pursue.

Another common video tutorial type is a short, focused lesson on a single aspect or feature of a design program. This includes videos that teach you how to use the pen tool in Illustrator or add a jump cut in Premiere Pro. These videos are ideal for students looking to learn a single design skill and need to learn those skills at an accelerated pace. These are the kinds of videos released by first-party providers like Adobe to assist new users. As a minor bonus, these are the videos rewarded by the YouTube content algorithm, meaning that there are likely to be many of them to choose from.

A final kind of video tutorial is a process-oriented video in which a creative walks users through the process they use to bring a project from start to finish. These videos tend to be less focused on how tools work and more focused on the techniques and thought processes that go into a given design project. These videos are ideal for students who are familiar with design tools but need more technical training.

Why Learn Design?

Learning design skills will allow students to turn their creative passions into career opportunities in almost any field they choose to enter. Every project, no matter how large or small, will need to employ creatives with design talent if it aims to communicate with a mass audience. Visual communication is essential to modern rhetorical persuasion and commerce, meaning that skilled designers will be involved in everything from logo design and branding to political campaigns and advocacy awareness. Both the private and public sectors employ designers to help them communicate and persuade their audiences, and there is no shortage of career opportunities available for talented creative designers.

Learning design skills is also a wonderful way for creatives to expand their work scope and reach. Digital design spaces represent a new canvas upon which designers can create their own complex work and reach audiences they would otherwise never have been able to reach. Digital art projects are becoming increasingly influential in political and social activism and the general art community. On a smaller scale, aspiring artists can utilize digital design skills to enter the world of digital art commerce and better position themselves to stand apart from their competition in this increasingly competitive marketplace. 

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How Difficult is It to Learn Design?

Since design isn’t really a skill as much as it is a field of different skills, it is hard to gauge exactly how difficult it is to learn. Some skills are harder to learn than others, particularly when designers shift from 2D to 3D design, but each skill will be different for each student. Since much of the difficulty in learning a design skill is learning theories of design and iterating on designs and styles, the more design skills you learn, the easier each subsequent skill will be to learn.

The prerequisites for each individual will vary depending on the program. As a general rule, graphic design programs like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator won’t have a ton of prerequisites. Web design skills, like Figma, will have graphic design skills as prerequisites (or will be taught alongside them), and motion graphics skills will require a significant amount of familiarity with computers and elaborate computer design tools (though likely not any program in particular).

The cost of learning design will vary depending on the kinds of programs that a designer seeks to learn. Students who only want to learn Photoshop will only need to license that program, while students looking to become proficient in all the major graphic design tools will need to license several different programs. As a general rule, most industry-standard graphic design tools are licensed through Adobe Creative Cloud; they will generally require students to pay a monthly subscription fee. While this fee fluctuates, it is generally $20 a month per program or $55 a month for the full suite.

Read about how difficult it is to learn design.

Learn Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Students looking to master design skills can find the path to success through the expert instruction offered at Noble Desktop. Noble offers a wide array of design courses, from introductory bootcamps that will teach students the basics of an individual program like Photoshop or After Effects to career-centered design certificate programs that will give students all the tools they need to enter the professional world as designers. Noble’s classes are available in person at their Manhattan campus or through live online instruction. Regardless, all of Noble’s classes are taught by expert instructors who are present to help guide students through the process of learning design skills. Each course ensures small class sizes so students won’t fight for their instructor's attention, and all of Noble's classes come with a free retake option, allowing students to enroll in the course again, for free, within one year. This means that students will have even more time and opportunity to get hands-on experience and instruction in design skills.

Students looking to become Graphic Designers may consider enrolling in Noble’s Graphic Design Certificate program. In this class, students will receive introductory and advanced training in tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These are the industry-standard tools in almost every field of print and physical design. Students enrolled in this program will receive hands-on experience working on real-world projects, such as designing signage, infographics, product packaging, logos, and branded merchandise. In addition, since this is a career-focused program, students will receive professionalization training, including one-on-one career mentorship and portfolio-building seminars designed to prepare students for entry into the job market.

Students looking to work in a more digital environment may wish to enroll in Noble’s Digital Design Certificate program. This course teaches students how to use programs like Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop and applies those skills to digital spaces, such as webpage layout design or user interface design. Students will learn digital design theories and philosophies and master necessary web design tools like Figma. This course also offers students the opportunity to receive one-on-one career mentorship. Students will build specialized design portfolios to position themselves as career-ready Web Designers and UI Designers. This course has no requirement for coding, meaning students can focus on the visually creative elements of web and digital design.

Noble also offers a wide array of certificate programs and bootcamps across all disciplines of design, including graphic design, web design, UX/UI design, motion graphics design, and video editing. No matter what direction you choose for your design education, Noble Desktop has a course built to suit your needs.