Best Free Visual Design Resources & Tutorials

Many professionals are eager to learn visual design but hesitate because of the perceived up-front costs. Visual design training involves learning a lot of different tools, many of which require monthly licensing subscriptions, such as those on the Adobe Creative Cloud. However, a surprising amount of free resources are available to help beginners get the hang of this exciting program.

Read on to learn more about the different types of free resources and tutorials available to help you learn visual design.

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.

Free Resources

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 many 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 offers many introductory courses on its official YouTube page, either through their Graphic Design playlist or 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.

Free Trials and Applications

Since the most expensive aspect of learning visual design (outside of enrolling in a training course) is acquiring the various design tools, users may be interested in exploring options to reduce this burden. Free trials are available for most major programs, and Figma (a commonly used user experience design tool) offers a free version of its program (with certain limitations).

Many of these providers also offer free tutorials and training services for new users, such as Adobe’s library of videos or the trove of free resources available through the Figma and Sketch user communities. There are also several free alternatives to programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. However, they may be slightly more limited and have fewer resources available to assist new users in learning how to operate these applications.

Key Insights

• Learning visual design skills can feel like it will cost students a lot of money, especially given how many different tools are required to build complex digital assets. However, there are many free training options and tools available.
• Students looking to learn visual design may wish to take advantage of free training resources, such as those offered by Noble or through first-party applications. These resources can be excellent tools for helping students become comfortable with the applications.
• Students can also take advantage of free trials of software like Photoshop, free versions of software like Figma, or free alternatives to programs like Inkscape.
• Once students are comfortable with their visual design skills and want to enroll in more advanced training courses, Noble Desktop offers visual design training courses to fit their needs.

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.