Visual Design Courses

Visual design is the combination of visual elements like lines, colors, type fonts, and white space and how they all impact the appearance, usability, and overall presence of a website or other visual creation.

Successful visual design relies on a strong, unique, artful visual concept. Think of all the great music LP covers over the years that have succeeded because of a strong, dominant visual design. Great visual design, or graphic design, concepts should enhance or even become the overall message, not detract from it. Without great visual design, many banner ads, TV commercials, show posters, and other visual materials would be less striking. The magic of visual design is that it hooks people’s attention and encourages them to examine other aspects of the piece more closely.‎

It's important to learn about visual design and graphic design because of the skills you can gain from these programs, such as visual elements for websites, videos, advertisements, business reports, and other media. As the world grows more digital every day, the visual design we see is most often represented in online visual materials.

Learning how to use visual design software can help you realize the work that goes into creating an art piece, an animated video, or a short film with strong visuals. It's a learned skill that can pay dividends down the road should you decide to turn visual design into a career.‎

Some careers that use visual design include graphic designer, creative director, and art director at marketing agencies. Another career is a visual stylist for retail merchandising companies. Someone with a visual design background could be the director of user experience for a web-based technology company as well.

These are the people who have gotten educated in art, design, visual aesthetics, software UI/UX, and more and have worked in the field to bring these skills to projects for companies and organizations.‎

Taking online courses is a great step forward for you to better understand the foundation and basics of visual design. If you're currently working in a technology area, you may already have a head start on understanding graphic design and visual design software programs.

But if you're ready to broaden your scope of visual design, and dig deeper into the software tools and the artistic sensibilities in visual design work, online courses can help further your knowledge base. Try courses that challenge your accepted notions of visual identity and graphic design. You may find the innovation you see in these new worlds of visual design and graphic design is very appealing to you as you move through your career.‎