What to Learn After UI Design

UI design is a field of graphic design that deals with the visual appearance of digital applications. UI Designers will blend text, images, graphics, and interactive elements to build evocative and vibrant digital interfaces. If you already know how to use UI design, you might consider learningtheories of user experience design, front end coding skills, or a handful of other graphic design tools. We’ll cover each of these skills below so you clearly understand what skill you want to tackle next.

What is UI Design?

UI design is the field of graphic design concerned with how digital applications look and how they communicate information to users. UI designers ensure that a digital application looks appealing and communicates effectively with its audience. UI Designers will create digital assets using graphic design programs and then build layouts and prototypes of those layouts to share for collaboration and testing. UI design pairs closely with UX design. UI designs concern themselves with how the digital application looks, whereas UX Designers concern themselves with how the digital application feels. These two fields work closely enough together that often, one designer will do both.

Visual and graphic design skills are vital to the field of UI design. UI Designers will need to learn how to utilize a variety of different graphic design programs, and they will need to understand theories and philosophies of composition. Images and graphics communicate a large amount of information in a small space, and it is the job of UI Designers to ensure that the information a digital application communicates aligns with the desired message that a client seeks to send. This will mean that UI design focuses heavily on any project's small details, assuring that all design elements come together to communicate ideas effectively. UI design is thus concerned with both the big picture design of a digital application and the visual design of the various individual components that are used to build the appearance of that digital application.

Read more about what UI design is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with UI Design?

Training in UI design will help creatives build vibrant and instantly memorable web designs and user interfaces for digital applications. UI Designers can blend text, images, and graphics to create functional and evocative designs using the various design programs. Unlike traditional graphic design projects, UI design projects will let creatives maximize the affordances of the digital canvas they are given, and UI Designers will be able to create digital layouts that communicate effectively and quickly. With so much modern communication happening over the internet, learning UI design is a powerful tool for expressing the interests of oneself and one’s organization.

UI design is also a useful skill for creatives who aren’t necessarily planning to build a career out of their graphic design training but still want to optimize their digital presence or their organization. Given the number of web applications designed to ease the process of web development, individuals can start designing and building digital applications for themselves or their organizations without only a little bit of UI design training. This is a bonus for small businesses, up-and-coming charities or nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and any other interest group that may want to build a web presence but is hesitant to hire professional Web Designers.

Finally, learning UI design can give existing creatives an entirely new medium to express their ideas. While web design is concerned with the functional elements of a digital application, learning UI design will allow artists and designers to build unique installations and projects that would otherwise be impossible to construct in a physical space. While most people receiving UI design training will do so with professionalization, learning how to build assets and art pieces online can give artists a new space to experiment with their creative ideas.

User Experience Design

User experience (UX) design is very closely related to UI design. Whereas UI design is concerned with how a digital application looks, UX design is concerned with how it feels to use. UX design teaches designers to consider how user behavior impacts a digital application, and understanding user behavior can be an important skill for UI design students. Since most UI Designers build layouts intended to be user-friendly and navigable, learning how to consider user behavior is an important skill.

Students interested in learning the basics of UX design should consider exploring Noble’s options for live online UX design courses.

Front End Web Development

In a creative field, UI Designers are rarely tasked with coding and launching the layouts they design. For this reason, some UI design students, particularly those working independently, may wish to learn front end web development skills, like HTML/CSS and JavaScript. These skills are useful for two reasons. First, learning web development skills will help UI designers by allowing them to code and launch their own designs. Second, learning web development skills will allow them to build individual application assets to improve their own design.

To learn more about front end web development training options, consider exploring the courses available through Noble.

Additional Graphic Design Skills

For UI design students coming into the field fresh, it may be useful to follow up their training with additional graphic design training. Many UI designers expand their resumes and skills by learning tools like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or using After Effects or Premiere Pro tools. Learning these skills is a great way to expand the scope of projects a designer can work on or improve their standing in the eyes of prospective clients.

To learn more about the many different graphic design courses available, students should explore Noble’s comprehensive training options.

Key Insights

• After learning UI design, students can take many different paths to expand their skills and career opportunities.
• Students looking to improve the quality of their digital designs should consider learning UX design skills to make their designs more responsive to user behavior.
• Students looking to launch their own web pages or build more complex interactive elements may want to learn how to code with HTML/CSS and JavaScript by enrolling in a front end web development course.
• Students who want to expand the scope of their creative projects may wish to receive additional training in fields such as graphic design, motion graphics, or visual effects.
• No matter what kind of additional training a student is seeking, Noble is there to offer comprehensive, professional training options.

Learn UI Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Once students have committed to learning UI design, they can receive hands-on training in one of the many UI design classes offered through Noble Desktop. These courses, available both in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and online, provide students with career-focused skills training in an industry-recognized educational environment. Students will benefit from working with live instructors who can answer their questions, provide feedback, and help them overcome any learning challenges they encounter. Even online, Noble’s classes boast small class sizes so that students can receive individual attention from their instructors. Plus, Noble offers free retake options, meaning that a student can re-enroll in a completed course within one year to receive additional training, review material, or just get a bit more hands-on UI design experience.

Students looking to learn the basics of UI design may wish to consider enrolling in Noble’s UI Design Bootcamp. This course will provide students with hands-on experience, using practical examples, designing the appearance of web pages and mobile applications. Students will receive training in the basic theories of composition and design and one-on-one feedback from expert instructors on the make-up of their UI design projects. This course is ideal for students hoping to learn the ins and outs of how to apply their existing knowledge of visual design tools to the process of building digital applications. Students who wish to enroll in this course should have a working knowledge of the user experience design tool Figma. Students looking for this training can enroll in Noble’s Figma Bootcamp.

Noble offers a UI Design Certificate program for students who want a more career-focused learning experience that will teach students all of the important fundamental skills they will need to enter the workforce as UI design specialists. Students will learn theories of composition and design and how to apply those theories of design to web pages and digital applications. In addition, students will learn how to use design tools like Figma, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator. This course caps off with a series of lessons concerning how to build a design portfolio to take onto the job market. With portfolio design training, one-on-one career mentorship, and the reception of an industry-recognized skills certificate, this course is ideal for students looking to build new careers in UI design.