Discover the fascinating subfield of visual design, UI design, and its importance in digital applications. Learn about the various classes and careers available in this field, and the potential salary ranges for various UI design positions.

UI Design Prerequisites

UI design is a subfield of visual design concerned with the appearance of digital applications. Learning UI design skills will help users blend colors, text, graphics, and images to create evocative, interactive layouts for digital applications. You might worry that UI design will be too hard to learn. This guide will help you understand the best methods for learning UI design and what you should study first to make the learning process easier. This way, you’ll be successful however you choose to apply your new skills. 

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.

Is UI Design Easy to Learn?

Learning UI design can be challenging for new students because there are a lot of different theories, tools, and techniques to learn. Experimenting with programs is easy and accessible, but learning how to best use those tools will take time and practice. This means that the difficulty of learning UI design will be informed by two key factors. The first is how familiar a student is with theories of design and how much time and effort they put into practicing their design skills. The second is how familiar a student is with the various graphic design and layout tools that UI Designers regularly use to build their layouts.

What to Know Before Learning UI Design

Learning UI design doesn’t have any formal prerequisites to learn. Novice designers can easily download a UI layout design tool and begin experimenting within a few hours. However, for students who are serious about learning UI design, there are a few things they may wish to learn before starting their UI design education.

Theories of Design and Composition

Since UI design is a visual design skill, it concerns itself with how images communicate meaning. Thus, novice designers should familiarize themselves with the basic theories of design and composition in order to better understand why it is important to be judicious in their choices. Learning how and why typography, colors, images, and graphics communicate certain meanings to audiences will greatly improve a student’s early design work. 

UI Design Applications

While UI design students will likely learn many graphic design tools, the only required tool is a user experience layout design application. Unlike many creative tools, there isn’t an industry-standard tool, so new students will benefit from exploring their options and beginning with a tool that they feel is right for them. Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch are the three major UI design tools. Noble offers a free introductory seminar detailing the differences between these programs to help new users select the right program. While the program a novice opts to start with will not fully define their training, picking the right application at the start can give new designers a leg-up in their training. 

Key Takeaways

• UI design is an aspect of digital design concerned with the appearance of a digital application.
• There are no formal prerequisites to learning UI design, though there are a few ways that new designers can prepare for their UI design training to make the process more efficient and less difficult.
• Novice designers should familiarize themselves with the basic elements of composition and design theories. Ideas concerning how typography, images, and colors communicate meaning will be vital knowledge for professional and hobbyist designers.
• Users should also research the various UI design tools available to them to decide which application they should learn first.
• Once users are comfortable with these tools and theories, Noble Desktop offers several UI design training courses to help students improve and master these skills.

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.