Why Learn Visual Design?

Visual design is the art of building the appearance of virtual assets for digital applications. Visual Designers are tasked with assuring that a digital application looks perfect using graphic design tools and other digital creative software. Have you ever explored all of the things visual design can do? Visual design training will help students find employment in in-demand fields across many industries, help them expand the scope of their creative work, and give them access to a new digital canvas to experiment with. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from visual design and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your overall goals, learning visual design is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume.

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 e-commerce. 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.

Common Professional Uses for Visual Design

Visual design training can open the doors to various career options across many industries. As companies and organizations become more focused on building a digital presence or producing products in the digital sphere, the skills required to make these products memorable and evocative are becoming sought after. Some of these career fields include:

Visual Designer: Visual Designers are the creatives who build a digital project's individual elements and assets. They will build digital assets such as banners, drop menus, slide shows, interactive photos, and many other kinds of interactive digital assets. They will be able to find work on various projects, ranging from web pages and digital applications to movies, tv, and film. Creatives looking to explore a new medium professionally should consider looking for job opportunities as Visual Designers.

User Interface Designer: Whereas Visual Designers are tasked with creating individual digital assets, UI Designers are responsible for bringing those assets together to create singular, cohesive design layouts for digital applications. UI Designers will work closely with Visual Designers, and at many smaller companies, the two jobs will overlap greatly (or be filled by the same people). UI Designers will work with tools like Figma and Adobe XD to build evocative digital applications.

Design Director: Often, digital projects are created by large teams of designers and developers working together to create complex products. In these contexts, companies often hire Design Directors who oversee designers' teams, ensuring that projects run smoothly. This position will require in-depth design knowledge to oversee projects and interpersonal leadership skills to keep the design process's human element working smoothly.

Expand Your Creative Skills

Visual design training will help students learn how to use various creative tools to build digital assets. This training will expand the scope of the creative projects they are capable of working on. Advanced visual design education will cover how to use a number of these tools in great detail. This means that students won’t just be preparing for a job in visual design; instead, they will be learning transferable creative skills that they can apply in their professional and personal lives. While visual design training will teach Photoshop skills emphasizing how to build digital assets for web applications, students will still receive extensive Photoshop training, which they can apply to their other creative endeavors.

Explore a New Digital Canvas

In the field of visual design, the medium of the digital world makes it possible to create interactive and immersive experiences that would have been impossible even a decade ago. With the rise of immersive virtual technology, such as VR, and the ever-increasing complexity of web design capabilities, artists and designers entering the digital world have access to tools that had never been dreamed of before. Digital art installations, virtual reality games, digital documentaries, and docu-games are just a few new artistic expression and activism genres that opened up in the last few decades. Through visual design training, artists, creatives, and activists can learn how to use these new tools.

How to Start Learning Visual Design

Students looking to learn visual design skills have a few options available to them in terms of their training format. Students will be able to enroll in live training seminars, both in-person and online, or they can enroll in on-demand, asynchronous courses. Each option has advantages and disadvantages, so students should consider their own needs and preferences before choosing a course. Students interested in comparing their options for visual design courses should consult Noble’s Classes Near Me tool.

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.

On-demand courses are ideally suited for students who need flexibility in their schedules, as these courses let them dictate when they learn and at what pace. Students with obligations or inconsistent schedules may find that these courses give them a much greater opportunity to learn visual design skills, as they can practice at their own pace. Lacking a live instructor means students must be more self-motivated in their learning, but many students may find this alternative ideal.

Noble also offers students many free resources to help them become comfortable with visual design fundamentals. Noble’s official YouTube page has many free recordings of seminars detailing both graphic design principles and introductory lectures taught in both their Graphic Design playlist and their Web Design and Development playlist. These free tutorials are a good place for students to introduce themselves to the basic concepts they will study in greater depth in a paid training program. Noble also provides students with articles, resources, and other tutorials on their Learn Visual Design page.

Read the full guide on how to learn 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.

Key Insights

• Visual design is a creative process focusing on constructing the visual appearance of the interactive elements of a webpage, mobile application, or other digital product.
• Learning visual design skills will allow students to enter an in-demand career field with job openings in hundreds of industries across the globe. As Visual Designers, students can work for companies building webpages, mobile applications, video games, movies, and so much more.
• Since visual design training overlaps so much with other fields of graphic design, learning visual design skills will give students access to tools that can help them expand their creative skills.
• Visual design training will also help artists, activists, and other creatives take advantage of the digital space as a new canvas for producing art projects.
• No matter why a student wants to learn visual design skills, Noble offers in-person and online immersive learning options.