Visual Design Prerequisites

Visual design is the creative process of designing the look and feel of digital assets and applications. Visual design training allows creatives to build vibrant, memorable digital assets by combining text, graphics, images, and color. You might worry that visual design will be too hard to learn. This guide will help you understand the best methods for learning visual design and what you should study to make the learning process easier. This way, you’ll be successful however you choose to apply your new skills.

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.

Is Visual Design Easy to Learn?

Since visual design is a creative skill, the skills that creatives use are fairly easy to pick up mechanically but will require much practice to perfect. Students can learn to use tools like Photoshop or Illustrator relatively quickly, but they will need to practice those skills for a great deal of time to master them. This is why guided training, like the live instruction classes offered by Noble, is valuable for new Visual Designers. Receiving expert guidance and feedback on projects will let students know how they can improve their work.

What to Know Before Learning Visual Design

Before students sit down to learn visual design, they should know a few things. Beyond basic computer skills, visual design students should consider reviewing some of the tools of the trade, and they should briefly cover some basic principles of composition and design philosophy.

Computer Skills

Since visual design is a subset of computer-aided design, students should be familiar with using a computer and navigating creative application interfaces. This is a fairly straightforward skill, but students shouldn’t be learning to save files or manage document folders as they are also attempting to learn how to use tools like Figma and Photoshop.

What Tools to Study

Visual Designers use a variety of creative applications in the process of building digital assets, so it would behoove students of visual design to look into these programs to understand what they do and which ones they want to learn. While many visual design courses teach students how to use tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma, not all Visual Designers will use that collection of tools, so exploring the options available to students is a useful first step.

Theories of Design and Composition

Since visual design is a creative discipline, students will greatly benefit from having background knowledge of some theories of design and composition. It is important for designers to know why certain combinations of text, graphics, images, and color communicate specific meanings. Visual Designers want to have a goal in mind when designing a digital asset, and knowing things like composition or color theory will help them outline and achieve those goals more easily.

Key Insights

• Visual design skills are the skills that let creatives build the assets that comprise digital applications like webpages and mobile apps. Visual design has no formal prerequisites to learn, but there are ways to prepare before getting started with training.
• Visual design skills are creative, so the basic process of using the tools is relatively simple to learn, but mastering them will require a great deal of practice.
• Before learning visual design, students should familiarize themselves with the basics of navigating a computer interface and ensure they have the systems required to run multiple design applications.
• Students should also review the options available concerning what tools they plan to use and learn. Not all visual design training courses will cover the same design applications, so students are encouraged to research their differences to make an informed decision about their training.
• Students will also benefit from reviewing theories of design theories, such as color theory and philosophies of composition. This will help them better understand why certain decisions are made, and it will assist them in outlining their own projects.
• Once students have reviewed these skills and feel ready for professional visual design training, Noble has in-person and online training options to help them master them.

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.