Visual Design Certifications and Certificates

If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate your skills in visual design, you might be overwhelmed by the different certifications and certificate programs available. You might also have many questions, such as how do I become certified, how important is becoming certified to my career opportunities, and how much time and energy it takes to become certified? This article aims to answer these questions so you can efficiently choose the right path toward a visual design certification. Keep reading to find out more.

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.

Certifications vs. Certificates: What’s the Difference?

It can be a bit confusing for aspiring designers to learn that there are multiple ways to become certified in visual design and that certification and certificate programs are different means of demonstrating proficiency.

Certification is awarded to designers who pass a single proctored exam testing their knowledge and skills in visual design. Third-party institutions and companies offer these exams, and they are generally not coupled with any form of skills training. Many certifications also expire after a set period of time, requiring designers to retake exams.

Certificates are awarded after industry-recognized training programs and are akin to a diploma. They communicate to employers that candidates have received sufficient skills training and are prepared to begin working. These do not often expire, though, for some programs, they may become outdated as new applications become common.

Top Certifications & Certificates for Visual Design

Noble offers students several options to receive visual design certificates through their training courses. Students may take shorter, skills-focused bootcamp courses to receive certificates of proficiency in skills such as Photoshop and Figma, or they can enroll in career-focused professional certificate programs like Noble’s UI Design Certificate course. These courses will provide students with hands-on experience with these programs and an industry-recognized certificate of completion when they complete the course. These courses are all ideal places to build the skills necessary to pass a visual design certification exam.

Several third-party proctors, such as CIW, offer visual design certification exams. In addition, some first-party providers, such as Adobe, offer certification exams in specific tools associated with visual design, such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

Should I Get Certified in Visual Design?

In a creative field like visual design, it is rare for a job opening to require that an application be certified in visual design. The most important thing for aspiring Visual Designers to have on the job market is a compelling sample portfolio of designs that impress prospective employers. However, becoming certified in visual design is a good way to set oneself apart from other candidates. Becoming certified will communicate to employers that a candidate is prepared to start designing right away and that they are comfortable with a wide range of visual design tools and principles.

How to Get Certified in Visual Design

The best route to becoming certified in visual design will depend on your current experience with the tools and techniques that certification exams will cover. Students with significant on-the-job experience or who have taken non-certificate granting training courses will likely prefer to sit down for a certification exam since they already have the skills that a certificate program will cover.

Certificate programs are ideal for anyone looking to learn visual design skills while becoming certified. These courses will teach students who don’t have significant training how to use the tools and techniques they would be tested on in a certification exam.

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 Designers looking to improve their career prospects may want to consider becoming certified in visual design. While becoming certified isn’t required for many positions, it is a good way to improve your standing in the eyes of prospective employers.
• There are two ways to become certified in visual design: by completing a skills training program that confers a certificate of completion or passing a certification exam demonstrating proficiency in the necessary skills.
• Certification exams are ideal for designers who have on-the-job training or have already taken a training program but have not yet become certified.
• Certificate programs are ideal for designers needing additional training or hands-on experience in a professional instruction environment.
• Whether students are looking for an industry-recognized certificate program or want to receive more training to pass a certification exam, Noble Desktop has a visual design training course to fit their needs.