Which Visual Design Training Format Is Right for Me?

Visual design is the art of building vibrant and memorable assets for digital projects like web pages and mobile applications. Using digital design tools to combine text, graphics, and images, visual design skills let creatives utilize the digital canvas in ways unique to the computer-assisted medium. Anyone hoping to expand their creative potential or prepare to enter an in-demand career field should consider visual design training. When comparing types of visual design training, there are many factors to consider. Everyone learns differently, and choosing the right training is critical to your experience. Keep reading to learn more about the different formats of visual design training, how they compare, and determine which is best for you. 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. Training Formats for Visual Design In-Person Visual Design Training One of the most effective ways to learn visual design is guided in-person training. These training courses allow students to work directly with expert instructors in an intimate setting where they can receive feedback, ask questions, and network with their instructors and colleagues. In almost every in-person training course, students can access the tools they need to learn visual design techniques. The drawback to these courses is that they are often only available in specific regions of the country, and students who aren’t located in major cities like Chicago, New York, or San Francisco may find that they don’t have many options for in-person instruction. Noble offers live training courses at its Manhattan campus, allowing students to receive live instruction from Noble’s expert instructors. These courses boast small class sizes, free retakes, and award industry-recognized certificates upon completion. Other service providers offer visual design training at their own home campuses, such as The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle or General Assembly in Chicago. To learn more about the options available for live visual design classes in your area, consult Noble’s Class Near Me tool. Live Online Visual Design Training For students not satisfied with the options available in their area for in-person instruction, live online training provides an alternate method of learning visual design. Live online classes replicate the biggest perks of in-person learning as they are taught in real time by expert instructors who can provide students with feedback and assistance. Class sizes remain small, and students can work one-on-one with their instructors to help master visual design skills. The drawback to these courses is that students will need to provide and maintain their own hardware and software, which can become pricey given the number of tools used in advanced visual design classes. Students looking to take classes online can take advantage of the courses offered by Noble. All of their classes are available through a live online instruction model. Students looking for live online visual design classes can consult the Classes Near Me tool to compare their options. These courses provide students the same advantages as Noble’s in-person classes, like free retakes and small class sizes. Noble’s Classes Near Me tool also helps students find and compare training opportunities from other service providers, such as General Assembly or Ledet Training. Free Online Courses & Tutorials Aspiring creatives may be interested in learning visual design but hesitate to jump directly into an immersive paid training course. For those students, Noble can help them become more comfortable with the tools and techniques of visual design through a free introductory course. These courses are designed to reflect the feel of an online learning course, and they set out to teach students the basic skills they will need in more formal training. Noble’s free seminars page provides students with dozens of free introductory courses on the basic elements of visual design. This includes an Intro to UI Design course where students will learn the principles and best practices surrounding designing web applications. Also available are several graphic design courses where students can learn how to navigate essential applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma. These courses are perfect for students who want to get a bit of hands-on experience with these programs before they enroll in a more advanced training program. Noble also offers many introductory courses on its official YouTube page, either through their Graphic Design playlist or their Web Design and Development playlist. These courses won’t be enough to replace more formal training for students with professional aspirations. Still, they are excellent resources for helping ease novice students into the more difficult aspects of visual design. Other service providers, such as Coursera and Udemy, offer free, truncated versions of their visual design courses. Students interested in these courses should consult the providers' available options. Read about more free visual design videos and online tutorials. On-Demand Classes Live training courses are the most in-depth and immersive training available. Visual design courses are available both in person and online. These courses let students interact directly with live instructors who can answer their questions and provide feedback on their work. In-person instruction also gives students valuable networking opportunities. Online courses give students the flexibility to enroll in courses anywhere in the country rather than being restricted to places they physically commute to. Comparison of Visual Design Training Formats Since there are so many different formats for learning visual design, students may be unsure which one is right for them. There are a few things to consider when choosing a visual design training program, such as how flexible a student needs to be and how important things like career mentorship or personalized feedback are to students. While there are many different options, no single option is strictly superior, so students should place their own needs and preferences at the heart of the decision. Live training options, available both in-person and online, are the most interactive and immersive training courses available to students. These courses let students interact directly with their instructors, who can answer questions and provide real-time feedback. These courses are ideal for students who will benefit from on-hand instruction, particularly in ways they could tweak or alter their designs. The drawbacks to these courses are fewfold. They are the most time-intensive and least flexible courses, meaning students will need to work their schedules around these classes. In addition, in-person instruction can be limited in availability, as courses are only offered at specific times and on specific campuses. Online learning offers more leeway here, but students will be required to supply and maintain their own hardware and software. On-demand learning options are far more flexible, allowing students to learn at a pace that suits their own schedules. These courses allow students to train on their own time, letting them practice at their own convenience. This can be very useful for students seeking to build their skills slowly or just looking to practice visual design in a more structured way. The drawback to these courses is that without a live instructor, it can be difficult to tell if a student’s practice is producing results. Practice is important when learning any artistic skill, and having personalized feedback can greatly improve the pace of a student’s learning. Free online tutorials are available to help ease students into the more difficult visual design concepts. These tutorials are ideal for students who want to become comfortable with basic applications and techniques or are preparing to enroll in more advanced visual design instruction courses. These courses are necessarily limited in depth, as they lack live instruction and often only cover basic concepts. They are great first steps for novice designers, but students who want to learn visual design for professional purposes will almost certainly need more training. Is it Possible to Teach Yourself Visual Design? As a creative skill set, it is possible to self-teach oneself in many of the tools involved in visual design. Still, it will be incredibly difficult to master any of the design principles without focused guidance and feedback from experienced designers. Students can learn the basics of tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, but they will need to spend much more time practicing these skills than those taking professional training courses. There are plentiful free resources available online to learn how to navigate visual design tools. Still, the bulk of learning visual design doesn’t lie in being comfortable with tools like Figma. Most of the challenges of learning visual design come through repeated iteration and practice, akin to sketching or painting. This is not impossible to self-teach, but it is very easy for students to fall into bad habits or spend a great deal of time making design mistakes that they don’t realize until it is too late. This is the primary benefit of expert instruction when learning visual design. In addition, it can be hard for students to judge what kinds of free resources are quality while trying to self-teach. While many excellent resources are available, even the good ones may be outdated or may not be relevant to the problem that a given self-teaching student is having. This can make it difficult for students attempting to self-teach to construct a curriculum for themselves, even if they have access to all the free resources they could want. How to Decide the Best Way to Learn Visual Design When deciding how to learn visual design, students should first consider their end goal regarding their training. Students who aspire to be professional Visual Designers will want to enroll in different training courses than students who are interested in expanding their artistic skills as a hobby. Visual design novices looking to get a feel for the programs and techniques they will need to train in may wish to consider watching a free seminar, such as Noble’s Intro to UI Design course. These courses will give students high-level overviews of the field and give them a taste of the kinds of projects that they will be working on in more advanced training courses. This also makes them a good first place to look for students interested in getting more training but unsure if the visual design is the field for them. Students with some background in graphic design and who want to expand their skillset or broaden their career options may wish to consider a skills bootcamp, such as Noble’s UI design bootcamp or one of their graphic design bootcamps. These training courses focus on specific skills that Visual Designers will utilize in their daily work and are ideal for students seeking to learn additional skills that can help them complement their existing proficiencies. For students who want to dive into a new career field, or for aspiring creatives who want to turn their passion into a profession, consider a career training course such as Noble’s UI Design Certificate program for students who want to dive into new career field or aspiring creatives who want to turn their passion into a profession. These courses will teach students complementary visual design skills and offer career training and mentorship designed to bring students from novice designers to professionals ready to enter the workforce. These are the most intensive and time-consuming training seminars, but they are perfect for anyone who wants to work in the in-demand field of visual design. 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.