How Difficult is it to Learn Visual Design?

Are you curious about learning visual design but worried it might be too hard? Of course, the difficulty that comes with learning a new skill is somewhat subjective. The challenges of learning visual design depend on factors likehow many different tools a student plans to learn, how comfortable students are with the process of creative design, and how much time students have to practice their designs.

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

What is Visual Design?

Visual design is a creative process concerned with building the assets and digital elements that make up webpages, mobile applications, and other digital media. Anything you see or interact with on a webpage or a mobile app was built by someone trained in visual design. Visual design is essential to building digital applications as it is so important that the assets they are built out of are evocative and memorable. From banners and menus to icons and overlays, visual design is concerned with building the elements that digital users most frequently interact with. Visual design aims to produce evocative and memorable assets which communicate their intended message to a large audience. Visual designers will use theories of design and composition to blend text, graphics, images, photos, and other interactive elements into digital assets that will help companies and organizations put their best foot forwards into the digital landscape.

Visual Designers will use many different tools to construct the assets digital applications will be built from. They will most frequently use graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to build these assets, so visual design overlaps greatly with graphic design and user interface design. Some visual designers will work to build entire digital applications, while others will only design assets for applications. Some designers will build elements for webpages, while others will work on movies, mobile applications, video games, or wearables. Using visual design skills, creatives can leave their mark on any number of digital projects and products. Since building a memorable web presence is so important to companies and organizations, creatives with visual design training are in high demand.

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

What Can You Do with Visual Design?

Visual design training allows creatives and professional designers to build vibrant and evocative digital assets and projects which take maximum advantage of the medium of digital applications. By blending text, graphics, imagery, and color with interactive elements, links, graphic animations, and other digital designs, visual design skills let you express your ideas in ways that would have been nearly impossible. The digital canvas provides creatives with a huge library of new tools for building designs, and visual design training will help students take advantage of these tools.

Learning visual design also opens the doors to an in-demand career field that spans positions across hundreds of industries. Visual Designers work on mobile applications and webpages and in the film and television industry, the video game industry, and emerging tech markets such as wearable technology and ecommerce. These jobs will allow aspiring designers to reach a massive audience by contributing to large projects as part of a dedicated team of Visual Designers. With this skills training, designers will be able to be a part of massive digital design projects, adding their voice to an impossibly large canvas.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning Visual Design?

The most challenging aspects of learning visual design will depend primarily on where students find themselves having the most difficulty. For some students, it can be difficult to juggle learning a large variety of design tools, especially if they aren’t familiar with computer-assisted design software. For others, the most challenging aspect may repeatedly be practicing and iterating on designs, particularly for students who aren’t used to creative design work. These issues are solved primarily through repeated practice and diligent attention to improving one’s work.

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

Visual design is most comparable to the two fields that overlap with it, graphic design and UI design. It is best to think of Visual Design as a hybrid of the two. Graphic design covers any computer-assisted creative work, even for traditional print media, and UI design specifically deals with the design of user interfaces for digital applications. These three fields have a great deal of overlap and use many of the same tools.

Graphic design and visual design differ primarily in terms of medium. Graphic design covers almost all creative work produced with digital design tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. These designs can be for billboards, posters, advertisements, or any other visual medium. Visual design is almost entirely concerned with building digital assets using those same tools. Those trained in visual design will often be able to do graphic design work. Still, visual design training tends to emphasize the specificities of the digital canvas as a medium.

UI and visual design are closely-related enough that they are often used interchangeably. The difference is another issue of emphasis. Visual design concerns all digital assets that make up a digital application. However, UI design primarily concerns how those elements come together to form a cohesive whole as a singular digital application. In short, visual design is concerned with the appearance of a button, a drop-down menu, a graphic design, and a banner advertisement as individual webpage elements. UI design is concerned with how those four elements interact with each other when they are used to populate a single user interface.

Please consult Noble’s Learn Hubs for graphic design and UI design to learn more about either of these fields.

Learning the Tools and Techniques

The best way to ease the challenges of learning visual design is to identify where students believe their problems will arise so that they may move more slowly and practice those skills more directly. Since there isn’t one definitive roadblock most students face when learning visual design, students should consider whether they are worried about the challenges of learning design tools or design techniques.

Students worried about the challenges of learning many new design tools may wish to focus solely on one application at a time and consider enrolling in a skills bootcamp rather than a more immersive visual design course. Students who are worried about learning the techniques of design may wish to review theories of composition and ensure that they are enrolling in a course that makes personalized feedback a key part of the training process.

Learn Visual Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Once students decide that visual design training is right for them, Noble is here to help with various visual design classes and bootcamps. These courses, available in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus or online, are taught by experienced instructors in small, intimate learning environments. Even the online courses are taught by live instructors ready to guide students through difficult concepts, provide valuable feedback on their projects, and answer their questions in real time. Small class sizes ensure that students can interface with their instructors directly, and Noble offers students enrolled in any course the option to retake it within a year. This will give students the chance to go over material they found difficult, attend a lesson they had to miss, or just get more hands-on visual design experience with the assistance of their instructors.

Noble offers several individual bootcamps to help students learn visual design tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Figma, alongside bootcamps teaching students the basic UI design principles. These courses will introduce students to the important features of the tools they will use when building digital applications and assets. Each course will give students hands-on experience using the featured application to work on practical exercises building the kinds of projects they would expect to make in a real-world professional environment. This gives students the practical training necessary to expand their creative toolkit and prepare them for more advanced visual design training.

For students who are looking to build a new career out of their visual design training, Noble’s UI Design Certificate program offers students the opportunity to learn all about the tools and techniques used by Visual Designers. This course emphasizes the creative side of web design, teaching students how to use tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to build evocative assets for digital applications. Then, students will be taught how to use programs like Figma and Adobe XD to build wireframe layouts of user interfaces that can be populated with the digital assets created in the graphic design process. Students will receive one-on-one career mentorship and spend a sizable portion of the class working on practical hands-on projects that students can include in their sample design portfolio when they enter the job market.