Graphic design courses are a great way to take your career skills to the next level. In today’s post, I gathered 8 of the best online graphic design courses that you can take for free.
Let’s get started!
Graphic Design Course #1: Become a Certified Presentation Guru
Become a certified presentation guru!Sign Up Now
Here at Visme, we want to give everyone the opportunity to create effective graphic design assets. That’s why we created a graphic design course to help you communicate with powerful messages.
We have years of experience helping our users create stunning designs. We’ve compiled this knowledge into a course that will offer you useful skills to improve your job performance and career prospects.
The Visme team has pooled our knowledge to create a course that will give you presentation skills to use at work and on your projects.
Graphic design is a skill we’re rarely taught. Instead, we often learn on the fly to meet a deadline or expectation.
In particular, this course will show you how to use graphic design principles to create presentations.
The benefits of well designed presentations are many. Beautiful presentations help us communicate persuasively with new prospects. Additionally, presentations can help us achieve buy in on a valuable new project at work.
In Visme’s graphic design class, you’ll learn how to use visual communication to make an impact on your audience.
Also, you’ll learn the key principles of how color, video, fonts and visual assets are blended together to create inspiring designs.
We’ll also review some of the exciting directions in data storytelling where you’ll learn how to present data that captivates your audience.
Ready to take your graphic design skills to new heights? Sign up for our free online design course now.
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Graphic Design Course #2: Designing 4 Advertisem*nts
A great option to learn graphic design is the free Designing 4 Advertisem*nts course on Udemy. This course takes you through the process of designing four full-page advertisem*nts in a unique and compelling way.
It’s a fantastic graphic design class because you get an inside look at the design process inside of an advertising agency. You’ll follow the process as the design concepts unfold in real time.
RELATED: 20+ Commonly Used Advertising Techniques in Visual Marketing
The straightforward lectures are a fantastic introduction to graphic design. Sign up here to start learning.
Graphic Design Course #3: Introduction to Typography
If you’re ready to learn graphic design, typography is an essential skill to master. The introduction to typography graphic design course will upgrade your skills in this area.
Great typography helps to enrich the meaning of language by displaying it in a beautiful visual form. There are many conventions and rules in the field of typography, but there is still room for innovation.
In this comprehensive online graphic design class, you’ll learn pragmatic skills. Also, you’ll explore the best ways to make aesthetic design choices and start working with a variety of fonts.
The content also includes principles of hierarchy, some software basics and a series of peer assessed assignments. Sign up here to start learning.
Graphic Design Course #4: Hack Design
Hack design is a simple to follow graphic design course for anyone who wants to create beautiful designs.
You receive a design lesson via email once a week. Each lesson is pre-designed by a design professional.
These parameters help you to integrate the lessons one at a time. In particular, they’re crafted to help you apply the knowledge at work.
One of the biggest issues with online graphic design courses is overwhelm. It’s sometimes challenging to know where to begin.
Hack design addresses this issue with curated resources. The team enlists top designers to send you new tools, tactics and techniques every week.
They send you the 50 lessons one at a time so you never get overwhelmed.
Design has a huge impact on people's lives and this course helps you to integrate the analytical and aesthetic components of your graphic design decisions. You’ll learn a holistic approach that helps to make all of the design elements work together in harmony.
Hack design is an interesting graphic design course because it balances important artistic considerations with practical decision making. Sign up here to start learning.
Graphic Design Course #5: Expressing Emotion with Color Theory
Color is a basic tool that’s important to learn early in your graphic design journey.
Adding this critical skill to your visual toolbox is the focus of this introduction to graphic design course.
Specifically, color can help you communicate the thoughts, feelings and emotions you need to convey in your project.
The correct use of color increases the professionalism of your designs. Additionally, it increases the likelihood that you’ll make a strong connection with your audience.
The course begins with a review of the basics of color theory. After learning these skills you’ll have the ability to mix and match colors into stunning and useful color palettes.
These effective color palettes are the building blocks that help to convey a sense of emotion to your audience. In fact, you’ll review the basics of how color can take your audience through a range of emotional reactions.
These basics will allow you to see how your design choices can impact the behavior of your audience. With this powerful tool of visual communication you’ll be empowered to create captivating messages.
When it comes to color theory the course covers terminology, different ways of creating colors and how to build a color palette.
Additionally, you’ll learn that the context of color is crucial, and how the use of color is critical to support the overall message of your design.
To learn these skills you’ll work on practical projects. In particular, you’ll create a series of images that express different emotions.
You’ll have the ability to choose which emotions you want to portray. Also, you can select from a suggested list of common emotions. Sign up here to start learning.
Curious about the basic steps you take to translate graphic design skills into persuasive presentation? Check out our short video on presentation design with Visme.
Graphic Design Course #6: Visual and Graphic Design
In the visual and graphic design course you'll learn some crucial graphic design skills.
In particular, the course covers how to skillfully use design elements such as lines, shapes, forms, tones, textures, letters and color.
Another great feature of this graphic design course is its detailed description of important design principles. Reviewing some of these key principles, the course reviews the principles you need to know in a rigorous and clear way.
For example, you’ll learn how to apply technical concepts like paraline, orthogonal, isometric, oblique, planometric and perspective drawing systems towards your graphic design goals.
Also, you’ll learn how to brainstorm and plan properly for your final output. This is done by identifying the elements of the production system you’ll be working with.
Some common examples are printing, digital, photography, photocopying and 3D processes.
You’ll learn how to create graphic designs for both these productions systems, and other popular options.
Additionally, this graphic design class covers how to use design elements like points, shape and size. Also, there’s a detailed section on using icons like arrows, letters, squares, triangles and other shapes.
Finally, the course has excellent reviews on using lines in design. In these sections, you learn how to work with space and positioning to amplify your message.
These skills are absolutely crucial for an introductory graphic design course, and this course gives a great overview. Sign up here to start learning.
Graphic Design Course #7: Creating Brand Systems
In the creating brand systems online graphic design course, you learn how to create a logo. Additionally, the instructor introduces the idea of a style guide.
You get an inside look at how these professional designers would organize the process of creating these assets.
This particular class is a good choice because of it’s manageable length. Also, the practical projects you complete during the course are exciting incentives to finish.
If you’re looking for a high level overview of how designers, illustrators and creatives design dynamic graphic design assets, this is a great course for you.
Two professional designers describe and discuss how they use collaboration to create visual effects for real businesses.
During this process, they give regular prompts so that you can join in the process. The output is that you create a stunning logo for your own project.
Overall, you’ll learn new visual communication skills that promote your brand and speak to your values. Sign up here to start learning.
Graphic Design Course #8: How to Make a Flyer
In this graphic design course, you’ll learn how to make a flyer with popular graphic design tools.
You’ll explore the particular insights that are crucial to flyer design. Plus, there’s a great section on pragmatic considerations like standards for flyer size, and much more.
During the course, you'll make a flyer to promote an event, service or initiative for your brand. Also, you’ll make a second flyer utilizing the popular flyer aesthetic called Art Deco.
There are important graphic design insights about using high quality photos. Another great feature of this graphic design course is that it reviews the best practices for using visual assets.
You’ll also learn how to get the most out of your design tools to create awesome flyers from the beginning to the end of the process.
RELATED: The Ultimate Guide to Flyer Design
After a basic review of flyer design, you’ll get started on a design of your own with a starter template from Visme. Overall, you'll learn how to make two eye-catching flyers of your own. Sign up here to start learning.
Choose Your Graphic Design Course Learning Path
I hope that these ideas for online graphic design courses inspire your learning journey. If you’re ready to take your graphic design skills to new heights get started with the Visme graphic design training today.
