What is Design?

Design refers to the large category of skills and tools utilized in mass visual communication. This includes photo manipulation, logo design, page layout design, user interface design, and digital animation. Given visual communication's importance in advertising, branding, and persuasive rhetoric, design skills are versatile and highly in demand. In this overview, you’ll learn more about what design is, what it can do, who uses it, and how to learn it to determine how to add this skill to your professional toolbox.

What Can You Do with Design?

As a creative form of visual expression, the things you can do with design are largely limited only by your imagination and the number of programs you are willing to learn. Users can design vibrant and evocative visual compositions ranging from simple logos, photo manipulations, and posters to complex 3D animations and digital web assets. Almost every professional field employs designers to ensure that their output looks the way they intend it to look and communicates the ideas they want. This is true of both the private and public sectors, given that design tools are just as important in persuasive and advocacy contexts as in commercial and advertising contexts.

Learning design skills is also a great way to build your profile and brand online. Online content creators need to set themselves apart from the crowd, and learning to make vibrant visual designs is a perfect way to do so. Whether this is about producing a logo for your website, designing recognizable branding for the products on your Etsy store, or editing and manipulating video content, learning design skills can improve your creative output. Design skills are also at the center of several different emerging online art and activism movements. Learning design skills can give creatives many mediums to produce rhetorical compelling advocacy content like infographics, digital documentaries, and docu-games.

How Do You Download Design Tools? How Much Does it Cost?

Since design is such a broad field of study, it is also a field of study that uses a wide array of different software applications. Each application will serve its niche purpose, be it manipulating photos with Photoshop or building 3D animated models with After Effects. Some designers will primarily use a single design tool, while others will need to learn a suite of tools to build elaborate and complex designs.

The most commonly used design tools across most industries are the design tools offered through the Adobe Creative Cloud. These tools include Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Adobe XD, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Cinema 4D. Since 2012, Adobe has shifted to a subscription model for its Creative Cloud programs, meaning users will have to pay a monthly fee to access these tools rather than a larger, up-front purchasing cost. These programs can be licensed individually for about twenty dollars a month. Students who want to use all of the programs can acquire a full Adobe Creative Cloud license for about fifty dollars a month.

There are free trials available for all of these programs, but once they expire, students will need to begin paying a subscription to access much of their work. There are also free alternatives to all of these programs. Still, those programs may lack key features, will not integrate easily, and are likely to offer students with fewer professional learning options.

What Are the Benefits of Learning Design?

Learning design skills will allow students to turn their creative passions into career opportunities in almost any field they choose to enter. Every project, no matter how large or small, will need to employ creatives with design talent if it aims to communicate with a mass audience. Visual communication is essential to modern rhetorical persuasion and commerce, meaning that skilled designers will be involved in everything from logo design and branding to political campaigns and advocacy awareness. Both the private and public sectors employ designers to help them communicate and persuade their audiences, and there is no shortage of career opportunities available for talented creative designers.

Learning design skills is also a wonderful way for creatives to expand their work scope and reach. Digital design spaces represent a new canvas upon which designers can create their own complex work and reach audiences they would otherwise never have been able to reach. Digital art projects are becoming increasingly influential in political and social activism and the general art community. On a smaller scale, aspiring artists can utilize digital design skills to enter the world of digital art commerce and better position themselves to stand apart from their competition in this increasingly competitive marketplace. 

Read more about why you should learn design. 

Design Careers

Given that design skills are at the heart of visual, mass communication, virtually every industry employs design skills in one capacity or another. Whether this is as simple as hiring a firm to design a new logo, using in-house designers to create packaging material for product releases, or hiring teams of designers to run a multi-media advertising or awareness campaign, design skills are utilized in several diverse contexts and industries. A few of the most common design careers include:

Designers: Designers, often called Graphic Designers, are tasked with creating the visual designs and iconography for traditional media projects, product packaging, branded merchandise, and other physical displays. They will use programs like InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator to create vibrant and memorable designs. Most Designers work as freelancers, are self-employed, or work as part of a firm, but a few are hired full-time by companies with large departments and a regular need for new designs. 

Web Designers: Web Designers are responsible for designing the visual elements of a web application. Sometimes, this involves designing a singular element of the application, such as designing a new tool or feature for an existing webpage. Sometimes, it involves designing the entire layout of an upcoming project. Designers will use tools like Photoshop and Illustrator alongside dedicated user interface design programs like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD. Some Web Designers may specialize as User Interface Designers, responsible for building the layout for a web interface, or as User Experience Designers, responsible for ensuring that the design is responsive to user behaviors and demands.

Motion Graphics Designers: Motion Graphics Designers use tools like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to create animated digital assets for various media projects. These include computer-animated films and television series, webpages and digital advertisements, and graphical special effects for media projects. Motion Graphics Designers ensure that animated assets move fluidly, believably, and look life-like should the project call for it. They also tend to work as part of larger firms that move from project to project, making this an ideal career path for creatives who want the opportunity to work on a wide range of different assignments.

How to Learn Design

Students interested in learning design skills will find that several different kinds of classes are built to teach them how to use digital design tools. Students will need to gauge their own learning preferences and styles to make an informed decision about what kind of class to enroll in. While every student is different, there are a few general differences between the kinds of design courses.

The most immersive and guided way to learn design is through live instruction, both in-person and online. These courses allow students to work with expert instructors in a private classroom environment with the opportunity to ask questions, get assistance, and receive feedback. This assistance can be vital for new designers hoping to understand the philosophies behind their design work. Even in an online learning environment, having access to a skilled instructor can be all the difference between success and difficulty in design education. 

In-person learning options tend to be more restrictive, given that they are only taught at specific training facilities, meaning that students will be restricted in where they can attend a course, and they will require a commute. However, these courses will give students access to on-site training labs and provide students with the necessary design tools they will need to use to advance their training. Online learning can be done from anywhere, meaning students will have a much larger pool of courses to choose from when they enroll in a design course. Still, students will need to provide their own technology, which can become expensive and cumbersome in more advanced design classes.

Students who cannot attend a regularly scheduled live training session may want to look at their options for on-demand design classes. These classes, which are given to students as collections of video recordings or training modules, allow students to work and learn at their own pace, making them ideal for students with work or family commitments that prevent them from attending a regularly scheduled online course. These courses are also ideally suited for students who want to learn an eclectic or specific mix of design skills since they can choose the courses they enroll in and prioritize the skills they emphasize. The drawback is that without live instructors, students won’t have a way to get feedback on their designs, which is a vital part of learning creative tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects.

Finally, students interested in learning design skills but aren’t sure what direction they want their training to take or whether online learning is right for them may want to take advantage of some free training resources to become more confident in their decisions. Noble Desktop provides students with a trove of free resources, articles, and seminars on their Learn Design hub, where users can become familiar with many of the tools and philosophies of design. In addition, Noble offers several free video tutorials on the graphic design playlist on its official YouTube page.

Read the full guide on how to learn design.

Comparable Fields

The field that people most closely associate with design is the plastic arts, such as drawing or painting. While the two fields share a great deal of overlap in terms of philosophical skills, design more heavily emphasizes computer-aided content creation. This means that if you learn design you will spend as much time learning about the tools and functionalities of those tools as you will about the practice of creating visual art. Visual art students may naturally gravitate towards design and find that they have a lot of transferable skills, but the two fields are distinct in the kinds of tools they work with.

Design is also often associated with copywriting and content development. While these two groups of professionals often work very closely together, they are rarely performed by the same person within a firm or a company. Content developers are responsible for creating the outlines and strategies for content creation, while copywriters and designers build different elements within that content strategy.

A less obvious association with design is digital development. For most digital projects, designers work alongside developers to see a project through to completion since visual creativity alone won’t launch a webpage or an online advertising campaign. In most web design projects, designers are responsible for deciding how a project will look, and developers are responsible for building the code that makes that project work. The primary difference between the two is that learning design skills won’t require you to learn how to program, and learning development skills won’t require you to be particularly creative if you don’t want to be.

Learn Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Students looking to master design skills can find the path to success through the expert instruction offered at Noble Desktop. Noble offers a wide array of design courses, from introductory bootcamps that will teach students the basics of an individual program like Photoshop or After Effects to career-centered design certificate programs that will give students all the tools they need to enter the professional world as designers. Noble’s classes are available in person at their Manhattan campus or through live online instruction. Regardless, all of Noble’s classes are taught by expert instructors who are present to help guide students through the process of learning design skills. Each course ensures small class sizes so students won’t fight for their instructor's attention, and all of Noble's classes come with a free retake option, allowing students to enroll in the course again, for free, within one year. This means that students will have even more time and opportunity to get hands-on experience and instruction in design skills.

Students looking to become Graphic Designers may consider enrolling in Noble’s Graphic Design Certificate program. In this class, students will receive introductory and advanced training in tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These are the industry-standard tools in almost every field of print and physical design. Students enrolled in this program will receive hands-on experience working on real-world projects, such as designing signage, infographics, product packaging, logos, and branded merchandise. In addition, since this is a career-focused program, students will receive professionalization training, including one-on-one career mentorship and portfolio-building seminars designed to prepare students for entry into the job market.

Students looking to work in a more digital environment may wish to enroll in Noble’s Digital Design Certificate program. This course teaches students how to use programs like Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop and applies those skills to digital spaces, such as webpage layout design or user interface design. Students will learn digital design theories and philosophies and master necessary web design tools like Figma. This course also offers students the opportunity to receive one-on-one career mentorship. Students will build specialized design portfolios to position themselves as career-ready Web Designers and UI Designers. This course has no requirement for coding, meaning students can focus on the visually creative elements of web and digital design.

Noble also offers a wide array of certificate programs and bootcamps across all disciplines of design, including graphic design, web design, UX/UI design, motion graphics design, and video editing. No matter what direction you choose for your design education, Noble Desktop has a course built to suit your needs.

Key Insights

• Design refers to a wide range of skills involved in creating digitally aided visual design projects. This can range from simple logos to commercials and marketing campaigns.
• Design careers are in high demand in both the public and private sectors, meaning that skilled designers will have several different career paths open to them.
• The cost of using design tools will vary depending on how many different tools a student plans on using. However, most industry-standard tools do carry a monthly subscription fee.
• Once you have decided to learn a design skill, you can turn to Noble Desktop for comprehensive design training, both in-person and live online.