Embark on a creative and rewarding journey in UI design, a subfield of graphic design that focuses on the visual appearance of digital application user interfaces. Learn the fundamental skills required to master UI design, understand how to utilize different graphic design tools, and accelerate your career growth or personal development in this thriving field.

How Long Does it Take to Learn UI Design?

Like many aspiringUI Designers, you might want to learn UI design but worry that it will take too much time. UI design skills will take the average user a few months to become comfortable with and then require significant practical experience to master. This depends on a student’s prior graphic design experience, the tools they have proficiency with, and the complexity of the design projects they are working on. Of course, this depends on several factors. Keep reading to learn about how you can learn UI design and some resources to help speed the process along.

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.

Average Time it Takes to Learn UI Design.

The amount of time it takes to learn UI design will depend on a few factors. Most notably, it will depend on how expansive of a skill set a student wants to learn in pursuit of UI design. While not essential, some students may learn several complementary skills to improve their career options, exponentially increasing the time it takes to learn UI design. Students with experience in graphic design programs can learn advanced UI design skills in only a few months. 

Other Factors

There are a few factors that will speed up or delay a student’s UI design training. These include how much experience they already have, what professional goals they set for themselves, and how much practice time they have to experiment with their designs.

Graphic Design Experience

Users with significant experience in graphic design will have an easier time learning UI design. UI design is both a subfield of graphic design and uses many of the same tools. Students who are already familiar with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator may find it easier to learn UI design layout applications and already have complementary skills taken into account.

Professional Goals

A student’s professional aspirations will also impact how long UI design takes to learn. Students who want to dabble in UI design and add a line to their resume may only take a few weeks to learn the necessary skills. Students hoping to start a new career and master UI design may find that it takes much longer.

Training Time

Since UI design is a creative endeavor, one of the most important aspects of learning it is to practice constantly. Students who have ample time to practice and iterate on their designs or are fortunate enough to receive on-the-job practice will learn the skill more quickly.

Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost 

UI design can be a fairly difficult skill to master at first because of the sheer number of tools users will need to learn how to use. Most UI Designers will need to know at least one user experience design tool, a photo manipulation tool, an illustration tool, a prototyping tool, and several other graphic design tools. This means that while novices can easily pick up individual skills, students may encounter more obstacles than they otherwise would, owing to the number of skills they will be trained in.

Likewise, there are no upfront costs to UI design as a skill, but new designers will need many tools to fully prepare themselves for a creative career building UIs. Licensing a web layout tool is a must; novice designers will likely need to license other graphic design software to build digital elements and construct creative and unique sample interfaces. This means that the cost of building UIs may vary from person to person, depending on the programs that they are using.

There are no formal prerequisites required to learn UI design, but there are a few skills worth brushing up on before entering a training program. Students should be familiar with and comfortable using a computer and design software. Additionally, it is worth knowing a bit about current graphic and UX design trends before setting out, as it can help students avoid common pitfalls that new designers may make.

Read about how difficult it is to learn UI design.

Watch a Free UI Design Online Course

Interested in learning UI design, but don’t feel like you’re ready to take the plunge into a professional training course? You may be interested in learning some of the basic UI design skills through free online courses and resources. While these courses are unlikely to replace a student's professional training in a UI design bootcamp, they are an ideal place to start learning fundamental UI design skills. 

Noble offers several free introductory courses through its website and official YouTube page. Noble offers a free Intro to UI Design course and a free Intro to Figma course. These courses will cover the basic elements of design philosophy and the basic functions of one of the market's most common UI design tools. These courses can help students become more comfortable with the ideas and programs they will practice during more advanced training courses.

In addition, Noble offers many pre-recorded courses covering web design and development concepts and graphic design concepts on their YouTube page. These video recordings will help students understand tools like Photoshop and Illustrator or design platforms like WordPress. These training options are ideal for students looking to get a taste of the various flavors of graphic design and who aren’t yet confident that UI design is right for them.

Free courses are also available through other professional training services, such as GeneralAssembly, Udemy, and Coursera. Additionally, for individual applications and tools, first-party developers like Adobe and Figma provide users with tutorials and videos instructing new users how to take advantage of their applications.

Read about more free UI design videos and online tutorials.

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.

Key Takeaways

• UI design is a subfield of graphic design that deals with the visual appearance of digital application user interfaces. Learning UI design can be done in about four to six weeks, but this is affected by several outside factors.
• Learning UI design will be faster for students with graphic design experience and know how to utilize graphic design tools.
• Learning UI design will be slower for students hoping to master the program to start a new career or who have minimal time to experiment with their designs.
• Noble Desktop offers comprehensive UI design training courses that can help greatly speed up a student’s progress in their training.