How Long Does it Take to Learn Visual Design?

Like many aspiring Visual Designers, you might want to learn visual design but worry that it will take too much time. It is difficult to tell exactly how long visual design will take to learn because it isn’t really a single skill but an application of a collection of skills. Users can pick up individual tools like Figma or Photoshop relatively quickly, but they will need much practice to master those skills. Additionally, some Visual Designers may work in industries like film and television that require them to learn even more specialized applications in their jobs. However, new students can pick up the basics of visual design quickly. Of course, this depends on several factors. Keep reading to learn about how you can learn visual design and some resources to help speed the process along.

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.

Average Time it Takes to Learn Visual Design

There is no set time that it will take students to learn visual design. How long it takes will depend on a large number of outside factors. However, students can expect to become comfortable enough with the essential tools of visual design in only a few weeks of training (possibly faster if they have prior experience with any tools). Then, students can experiment with their designs and begin mastering the tools and techniques of visual design.

Other Factors

A few factors will speed up or slow down the process of a student’s visual design education. Fortunately, some of these factors are well within a student’s control. They will have to choose how many different design tools they want to learn and gauge what they intend to do professionally with their visual design training. Less in a student’s control is their comfort and experience learning creative skills like visual design.

Number of Tools Learned

While there are a few programs that almost all graphic design students will learn (like a user experience design tool and a vector graphics illustration tool), new students should consider which tools they plan to learn, as that decision will greatly impact how long it takes to learn visual design. Students who only learn a handful of tools will be ready to start experimenting sooner, but the scope of their work will be more narrow.

Professional Aspirations

A key factor in how long it will take you to learn visual design is what your career goals are. For students looking to enter the workforce as Visual Designers, a great deal of training will be necessary. Further, students looking to enter certain industries, like the film and television industry, may need to learn industry-specific skills, making their learning process take longer.

Design Experience

Since visual design is a creative skill, one of the most important elements of learning how to do it is to practice and iterate on designs. For students with ample design experience, this won’t be out of the ordinary, and students who have previous artistic training will find that this comes naturally. Students without this experience may find it one of the more difficult aspects of learning visual design, causing them to slow down.

Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost

Since it is a creative skill, it is hard to gauge how difficult learning visual design will be for students. Those with experience working on creative projects may find that it comes naturally to them. Those without experience may find it difficult to begin projects or be unaccustomed to the amount of iteration and practice that these skills require. As with most creative skills, the more practice you have, the easier it will be, and given the number of different tools that Visual Designers will use, this can be daunting for some.

There are no formal prerequisites to learning visual design. Students will need to be familiar with computers, and they will need to have access to hardware that can run the various programs and applications that they will be using. Students won’t have to learn any specific software, but they will likely need to learn at least how to use a few different graphic design and user experience design applications.

Since there are no set programs or applications that Visual Designers need to use, there isn’t a set cost to learning and practicing visual design. While students will likely need multiple different tools, they have options regarding what tools they plan to use. The most commonly used tools do come with licensing subscriptions. There are free, trial, and alternate options available to students, so the cost of practicing visual design will change from person to person.

Read about how difficult it is to learn visual design.

Watch a Free Visual Design Online Course

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.

Key Insights

• Learning visual design, the art of building digital assets for web and mobile applications, will take students more or less time to learn, depending on a few factors. However, suppose the goal is to become comfortable enough with your skills to experiment outside a classroom environment. In that case, students will pick up these skills in only a few weeks of dedicated training.
• Users hoping to learn visual design to start a new career will need substantially more training, and this will likely take students months of regular study to acquire.
• Users with previous experience with specific design tools or practical experience with design programs or artistic education will find visual design skills easier to acquire.
• Students looking to speed up their visual design training should consider enrolling in one of the comprehensive courses offered by Noble, available both in-person and online.