Visual Design Cost

There is no set cost for practicing visual design skills. Since visual design training involves many different design tools, none of which are strictly required, the process of learning visual design can be either fairly costly (for students wanting to learn a lot of different tools) or fairly inexpensive (for students wanting to learn only a few applications to begin with).

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.

In-Depth Review of the Cost

For Visual Designers, there are only a few tools that they will definitely need to acquire. Novices will need to license some kind of user experience design tool, with the three most common versions being Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch. Noble offers a useful free introductory seminar detailing the differences between these programs, which covers the program's costs. In short, Figma offers a robust free version of its program and has a large community of developers producing free resources for users. Adobe XD is the most expensive but has the deepest pool of features. Sketch is the cheapest, but it is only available for macOS machines.

Other tools that many Visual Designers wish to learn may include Photoshop and Illustrator, both of which are available as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. These programs come with a monthly fee of between 20 and 54 dollars, depending on the number of programs that will be licensed. They can be bundled together alongside other creative software, most notably Adobe XD, but the cost of licensing a lot of these programs can add up quickly.

Free alternatives to these programs are available, such as Inkscape for Illustrator and Darktable for Photoshop. While these free alternatives can reduce the cost of visual design, there will be far fewer training resources available for these programs, and users may likely wish to use some features that are not available with these free applications. Hence, it is a choice that any given student will have to make for themselves.

Why Learn Visual Design?

Learning visual design skills will help professional designers and aspiring creatives expand their career opportunities and discover new ways to express themselves creatively. By learning how to use visual design tools and techniques, students will be learning a skill set that is in high demand across many industries, owing to the increasing importance placed on digital design. Any company looking to advertise online, post-digital updates on their webpages, design mobile applications for their products and services, or simply launch web pages will need skilled Visual Designers who can ensure these projects are visually appealing.

For creatives who aren’t as concerned with the marketability of their skills, learning visual design offers to teach students how to use a whole new medium to express themselves. Visual design skills like Photoshop and Illustrator will help expand the tool kit that creatives have to work with, and the expansiveness of the digital canvas will open up many new options for creative experimentation. Visual Designers can build interactive infographics, digital art projects, digital documentaries, and other expressive works. The interactive space of the internet offers creatives untold possibilities if they receive the correct technical training.

Read more about why you should learn visual design.

Free Introductory Visual Design Course Online

Aspiring creatives may be interested in learning visual design but hesitate to jump directly into an immersive paid training course. For those students, Noble can help them become more comfortable with the tools and techniques of visual design through a free introductory course. These courses are designed to reflect the feel of an online learning course, and they set out to teach students the basic skills they will need in more formal training.

Noble’s free seminars page provides students with dozens of free introductory courses on the basic elements of visual design. This includes an Intro to UI Design course where students will learn the principles and best practices surrounding designing web applications. Also available are several graphic design courses where students can learn how to navigate essential applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma. These courses are perfect for students who want to get a bit of hands-on experience with these programs before they enroll in a more advanced training program.

Noble also offers many introductory courses on its official YouTube page, either through their Graphic Design playlist or their Web Design and Development playlist. These courses won’t be enough to replace more formal training for students with professional aspirations. Still, they are excellent resources for helping ease novice students into the more difficult aspects of visual design.

Other service providers, such as Coursera and Udemy, offer free, truncated versions of their visual design courses. Students interested in these courses should consult the providers' available options.

Read about more free visual design videos and online tutorials.

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.