Unlock new career opportunities and expand your creative canvas with UI design. This field of digital application design is in high demand, providing various career paths for skilled professionals and opening new avenues for expressive communication.

Why Learn UI Design?

Have you ever explored all of the things UI design can do? UI design is building the visual look of a digital application. UI design skills will allow professionals and amateurs to create memorable, vibrant digital applications that are both functional and evocative. UI design skills will help professionals use the medium of the digital application to communicate quickly and effectively with huge audiences. It will give artists and creatives a new canvas to explore. Plus, UI design skills are in high demand, so learning to build digital applications will open many career paths. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from UI design and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your goals, learning UI design is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume. 

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.

Common Professional Uses for UI Design

Since having a memorable and evocative digital presence is so important in the modern marketplace, many companies and firms are hiring professionals who can design digital applications that effectively communicate the messages a brand wants to communicate. Within the field of UI design, there are many possible career paths for skilled creatives to go down, such as:

User Interface Designer: UI Designers are tasked with building a digital application's visual look and appearance. They will be responsible for ensuring that the application communicates the messages that a client wants to be communicated memorably and effectively. They will often work alongside other designers to build parts of a larger project. Some UI Designers will be responsible for building individual assets or aspects of a bigger design. UI Designers will need to be trained in user experience and graphic design software.

Visual Designer: Visual Designers are tasked with creating the individual elements of visual language that allow other creatives to construct layouts and designs. They work across many industries, building assets for use in advertising, webpages, games, and applications. They will construct assets like banner ads, text overlays, fonts, and other individual elements of digital design. They will use many of the same tools as UI Designers, and their responsibilities and assignments may often overlap at smaller firms.

Design Director: As so many design projects involve large-scale collaboration between teams of designers and developers. Design Directors oversee this design process and help teams collaborate to deliver the best product possible. Design Directors will need both the technical skills of a UI Designer to oversee these teams' work and a Project Manager's interpersonal skills to ensure that the human element of a design project is managed effectively. Design Directors may also need to learn complementary skills to assist other elements of a project team, like web development, UX design, or market research.

Build more evocative digital applications

Fundamentally, graphic design fields like UI design are concerned with how images communicate meaning. Learning UI design skills will help users better understand how something as simple as a user interface or web page elements can say far more than is immediately apparent. This means that creatives can pay careful attention to their designs and more effectively convey the messages they or their employers want. This is an essential skill for designers who want to work to create a coherent brand identity for themselves or their organization.

Learning UI design entails learning composition skills and how design elements like typography, colors, and graphics work together to convey meaning. This means that designers who study UI design will learn how to construct more evocative digital applications that communicate directly with a large audience of consumers. By studying how designers can apply these theories to the digital world, UI designers can ensure that their designs are saying what they intend to communicate.

Learn a New Digital Canvas

There are many reasons to learn UI design for creatives who are more interested in building visual imagery than affirming brand identities. By learning how to build digital interfaces, creatives can explore an entirely new canvas to display their graphic designs. In addition, because UI design teaches users how to create user experience interfaces, creatives can add interactive elements to their creations that would otherwise be impossible in any other media.

Learning UI design will help creatives, advocates, and other civic-minded individuals communicate with audiences in new and creative ways. Rather than simply producing posters and infographics, learning UI design will allow information to be expressed in ways that help guide an audience in the ways that a design intends, making the impact of that information all the more impactful.

How to Start Learning UI Design

Students looking to learn UI design have many options to choose from in terms of professional training options. Students can take courses either in-person or online, and they can take their courses either with live instructors or through an on-demand, self-paced learning style. Each of these course options will have certain advantages and disadvantages. Regardless of the course, Noble can help you with UI design classes through their Courses Near Me tool.

Noble can assist students in finding live in-person and online classes. These classes have the advantage of letting students interact with expert instructors who are ready to help them learn the fundamental concepts of UI design. Students can ask questions and receive feedback on their designs directly. Live in-person learning has the added advantage of providing students with access to the technology they need to practice UI design skills. Live online classes can allow students to attend coursework regardless of location.

For students whose schedule will not allow them to attend a regularly scheduled live course, on-demand course options exist to help them control the pace of their training. These courses come in several different formats, but they all aim to allow students the freedom and flexibility to practice and learn when they have the chance to do so, rather than tying them down to a specific schedule. These classes are ideal for students with work and family obligations that restrict them from spending 30 or more hours a week in a classroom. Noble can help students find online UI design options available to them.

Finally, free tutorials are available to help students learn the basics of UI design. These tutorials include video resources and free training seminars. Noble offers students several pre-recorded video training courses through the Web Design and Development playlist on their official YouTube page. Here, students can watch free videos detailing the philosophies behind UI design and the specific tools that UI Designers will be tasked with using. Additionally, interested students can find interviews, articles, and UI design resources on Noble’s Learn UI design page.

Read the full guide on how to learn UI design.

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 the art of building digital applications that communicate meaning in memorable and effective ways. UI design is concerned primarily with the look and appearance of a digital application.
• UI design skills are in high demand as companies invest in ensuring they have a memorable and evocative web presence. Learning UI design is a great way to open up several new career opportunities.
• Learning UI design is a great way to improve your familiarity with design principles, like color and composition theory. This will help designers build better digital applications and communicate more effectively with the rest of their graphic output.
• Artists, creatives, and other advocates can also benefit from learning UI design principles to open up a new canvas for creativity, exploration, and experimentation.
• No matter why you want to learn UI design, Noble Desktop offers courses to help you achieve your long-term goals.