Visual Design Video Tutorials

Visual design is the art of building the visual appearance of digital assets that populate webpages, mobile applications, and other virtual spaces. Visual Designers will blend text, color, images, and interactive tools to build vibrant and evocative banner ads, slideshows, scroll menus, and other important elements of digital interfaces. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning visual design. Video tutorials are ideal for students who want flexibility in their training, want to experiment with a new skill, and want to see other creatives in action while learning visual design. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

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.

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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.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning Visual Design?

Video tutorials are a great way to start learning visual design because they offer students a low-investment way to become familiar with the tools and techniques of visual design. Since they almost always have no upfront cost, the only major investment is time. This means that students new to visual design won’t feel locked into one training regiment or path before they have a chance to experiment with different videos and learning options. Plus, this means that students can watch many different videos at their discretion rather than being compelled to keep with a training plan that isn’t working for them.

In addition, video tutorials let students control the pace of their learning, giving them the flexibility to start and stop practicing at their convenience. Beyond being able to pick up and put down video tutorials, students using them can pause, rewind, fast-forward, or navigate the videos to help them better understand concepts that they may be struggling with. They can even pause a video, look up a different video that provides a more detailed explanation of the concept they are having difficulty with, and then return to the original video to continue their lesson. This level of freedom is great for students who are still very new to visual design since it lets them decide what they want to become comfortable with early on in the process.

Types of Visual Design Videos

There are quite a few different types of video tutorials that students can find to help them learn the basics of visual design. The most immersive type of video is long-form videos that replicate the feel of an online course by slowly guiding students through an introductory lesson to an element of visual design. These are the kinds of videos offered by Noble.

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.

The second common video tutorial type is a short, focused video that addresses a single visual design element. Rather than teaching a viewer about all design elements, these tutorials teach students specific skills, like how to work with designs in Figma or manipulate color in Photoshop. These videos offer students a great deal of flexibility. Platforms like YouTube are the most plentiful kind of video tutorial because the algorithm encourages this style of video.

A final common type of video tutorial is a process-oriented tutorial in which a creative walks viewers through the process they take when working on a visual design project. These videos tend to be less directly explanatory than others. Still, they are ideal for students who understand the basic tools of visual design but want to see techniques put into action.

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.

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How Difficult is It to Learn Visual Design?

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.

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.