What to Learn After Visual Design

Visual design is the creative art of building assets for digital projects such as mobile applications, webpages, or user interfaces. Visual design skills cover many creative tools to build vibrant, evocative digital objects. If you already know how to use visual design, you might consider learning more specialized graphic design applications, front end web development skills, or theories of user experience design. We’ll cover all these skills below so you clearly understand what skill you want to tackle next.

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.

Motion Graphics and Animation

Once students have mastered tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, they may wish to learn more elaborate graphic design tools, such as motion graphics tools such as Adobe After Effects or Adobe Premiere Pro. These motion graphics and video editing tools will offer an even wider range of opportunities for creative-minded designers looking to expand their canvas into the world of television, film, or video editing. Students can learn how to create more complex digital assets and begin working on more complex digital projects.

To learn more about motion graphics training courses, consult the courses Noble has to offer.

User Experience Design

Some visual design students looking to build their own web pages and digital applications may want to consider UX design training. Whereas visual design concerns how a digital layout looks, UX design concerns how it feels in the hands of users. Since most digital assets aim for interactivity, it is important to consider how users will behave once they have those interactive elements. UX Designers collect user feedback and gather data to understand how users interact with a digital design so that they can optimize it for functionality, accessibility, and navigability.

For students interested in UX design training, Noble offers both introductory and advanced course options.

Front End Web Development

As a creative endeavor, visual design skills only teach students how to build the appearance of a digital asset. To add functionality and launch those assets, they will have to hand the project off to Web Developers who can code the designs into working applications. Some students, particularly those looking to work with more complex designs, may want to learn front end web development skills like how to code with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. These coding languages cover the appearance and functionality of modern web pages, so learning how to code with them will give designers more freedom to build designs without needing to rely on developers.

To learn about front end web development training options, students can explore the options offered to them through Noble.

Key Insights

• Once a student feels comfortable with their visual design training, there are a lot of different directions that they can go to develop their skills.
• Students may wish to learn more complex graphic design tools to help them expand the scope of the projects they are building. For instance, designers hoping to work in television or film may wish to learn animation programs like Adobe After Effects.
• Visual Designers hoping to remain in the field of web design may want to learn some UX design principles to ensure that the assets they create feel good when they have left the design phase and are in the hands of real users.
• Designers may also wish to learn web development skills like HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Learning how to code their assets will make them less reliant on Web Developers and have greater flexibility in building their assets.

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.