Explore the vast possibilities and challenges of UI design, a field of graphic design that deals with the visual appeal and effective communication of digital applications. Learn about the tools, skills, and training necessary to build a career in this sector or simply enhance your digital presence.

How Difficult is it to Learn UI Design?

Are you curious about learning UI design but worried that it might be too hard? Of course, the difficulty that comes with learning a new skill is somewhat subjective. The challenges of learning UI design depend on factors like prior graphic design experience, comfort with creative tools, and professional aspirations. 

No matter your current schedule or comfort level with UI design, plenty of tools are available to help make learning easier than you might think.

What is UI Design?

UI design is the field of graphic design concerned with how digital applications look and how they communicate information to users. UI designers ensure that a digital application looks appealing and communicates effectively with its audience. UI Designers will create digital assets using graphic design programs and then build layouts and prototypes of those layouts to share for collaboration and testing. UI design pairs closely with UX design. UI designs concern themselves with how the digital application looks, whereas UX Designers concern themselves with how the digital application feels. These two fields work closely enough together that often, one designer will do both.

Visual and graphic design skills are vital to the field of UI design. UI Designers will need to learn how to utilize a variety of different graphic design programs, and they will need to understand theories and philosophies of composition. Images and graphics communicate a large amount of information in a small space, and it is the job of UI Designers to ensure that the information a digital application communicates aligns with the desired message that a client seeks to send. This will mean that UI design focuses heavily on any project's small details, assuring that all design elements come together to communicate ideas effectively. UI design is thus concerned with both the big picture design of a digital application and the visual design of the various individual components that are used to build the appearance of that digital application.

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

What Can You Do with UI Design?

Training in UI design will help creatives build vibrant and instantly memorable web designs and user interfaces for digital applications. UI Designers can blend text, images, and graphics to create functional and evocative designs using the various design programs. Unlike traditional graphic design projects, UI design projects will let creatives maximize the affordances of the digital canvas they are given, and UI Designers will be able to create digital layouts that communicate effectively and quickly. With so much modern communication happening over the internet, learning UI design is a powerful tool for expressing the interests of oneself and one’s organization.

UI design is also a useful skill for creatives who aren’t necessarily planning to build a career out of their graphic design training but still want to optimize their digital presence or their organization. Given the number of web applications designed to ease the process of web development, individuals can start designing and building digital applications for themselves or their organizations without only a little bit of UI design training. This is a bonus for small businesses, up-and-coming charities or nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and any other interest group that may want to build a web presence but is hesitant to hire professional Web Designers.

Finally, learning UI design can give existing creatives an entirely new medium to express their ideas. While web design is concerned with the functional elements of a digital application, learning UI design will allow artists and designers to build unique installations and projects that would otherwise be impossible to construct in a physical space. While most people receiving UI design training will do so with professionalization, learning how to build assets and art pieces online can give artists a new space to experiment with their creative ideas.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning UI Design?

Like most creative design processes, the most challenging part of UI design is becoming comfortable with the tools and learning how to iterate designs repeatedly. Like learning to draw, learning UI design will require lots of practice. While there are ways to ease the process of learning UI design (like learning other graphic design tools), at the end of the day, there is no replacement for constant practice, iteration, and repetition.

How Does Learning UI Design Compare to Other Applications/Languages/Fields?

UI design is most comparable to other visual design fields and its sister field, UX design. Since UI design uses many of the same tools as these other fields, the main difference is in how those tools are used and what techniques are applied.

UI Designers will use many of the same tools that Graphic Designers will use, and in many professional environments, there is a great deal of overlap between the two positions. Graphic Designers will likely learn programs like Photoshop and Illustrator and use those programs to design the digital assets that UI Designers will place into digital layouts. The primary difference between these fields is that UI Designers will learn how to use additional tools for building user experience layouts, many of which were developed to address the limitations of programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. Students interested in learning more about graphic design should consult the topics page on Noble’s website.

UI design is also closely tied to UX design. UI Designers are tasked with designing how a digital application looks, and UX Designers are tasked with designing how a digital application feels. Both professions will use user experience design tools, but UX Designers will be more concerned with using them to create prototypes of digital applications for testing. UX design primarily collects user feedback to determine how real users use an application. This makes it a significantly more analytic field, and whole UX and UI design may take the same time to learn. UX design will deal more with data collection and interpretation than UI design. Noble’s learn page provides many articles on UX design.

Prior Graphic Design Experience

Learning UI design will be much easier for students with prior graphic design experience because they will already be familiar with the tools and theories of the field. Students with knowledge of tools like Photoshop or Illustrator will have an easier time learning how to use tools like XD and Figma, and they will be able to apply their graphic design knowledge to their UI design projects.

Professional Aspirations

The difficulty of learning UI design will also depend on what a student aspires to do with their new skills. Students looking to achieve a basic proficiency in UI design to help bolster their resume may find it a relatively easy skill to pick up, especially if they have experience with complementary skills. Students hoping to build a new career out of their UI design skills will need a lot more training and experience, making learning UI design far more challenging.

Learn UI Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Once students have committed to learning UI design, they can receive hands-on training in one of the many UI design classes offered through Noble Desktop. These courses, available both in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and online, provide students with career-focused skills training in an industry-recognized educational environment. Students will benefit from working with live instructors who can answer their questions, provide feedback, and help them overcome any learning challenges they encounter. Even online, Noble’s classes boast small class sizes so that students can receive individual attention from their instructors. Plus, Noble offers free retake options, meaning that a student can re-enroll in a completed course within one year to receive additional training, review material, or just get a bit more hands-on UI design experience.

Students looking to learn the basics of UI design may wish to consider enrolling in Noble’s UI Design Bootcamp. This course will provide students with hands-on experience, using practical examples, designing the appearance of web pages and mobile applications. Students will receive training in the basic theories of composition and design and one-on-one feedback from expert instructors on the make-up of their UI design projects. This course is ideal for students hoping to learn the ins and outs of how to apply their existing knowledge of visual design tools to the process of building digital applications. Students who wish to enroll in this course should have a working knowledge of the user experience design tool Figma. Students looking for this training can enroll in Noble’s Figma Bootcamp.

Noble offers a UI Design Certificate program for students who want a more career-focused learning experience that will teach students all of the important fundamental skills they will need to enter the workforce as UI design specialists. Students will learn theories of composition and design and how to apply those theories of design to web pages and digital applications. In addition, students will learn how to use design tools like Figma, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator. This course caps off with a series of lessons concerning how to build a design portfolio to take onto the job market. With portfolio design training, one-on-one career mentorship, and the reception of an industry-recognized skills certificate, this course is ideal for students looking to build new careers in UI design.