Live Online Graphic Design Summer Courses

Learn graphic design this summer with NextGen in our hands-on graphic design programs tailored to high school students. Work on projects to master the industry-standard design tools. Live online classes are held 10am-1pm ET on weekdays in Summer 2021.

Graphic Design Summer Course Live Online

In this graphic design program for High School students, you'll master the most powerful tools in graphic design: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.

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- $2,495
- 57 hours
- Weekdays only
- Open to beginners
Course information See upcoming dates
Web Design Summer Course Live Online

Get started in web design with this summer course. Students first learn to build and design webpages by coding HTML & CSS. Students will also learn to create webpage layouts in Sketch, as well as optimize web graphics for hi-res screens and fast downloads.

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- $1,999
- 30 hours
- Weekdays only
- Open to beginners
Course information See upcoming dates

NYC Graphic Design Summer Courses

Learn graphic and web design in-person in Midtown Manhattan this summer. Master the essential Adobe applications and start creating your own projects. NYC classes are held 10am-4pm ET on weekdays in Summer 2021.

Graphic Design Summer Camp NYC

Learn the graphic design theory and the essential Adobe applications, including Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. In this summer course in NYC, high school students work on real-world design projects.

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- $2,495
- 50 hours
- Weekdays only
- Open to beginners
Course information See upcoming dates
Web Design Summer Camp NYC

Learn to design websites with Sketch and code the final product with HTML & CSS. In this summer course, high school students learn the essential skills to start designing and developing their own websites.

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- $2,495
- 50 hours
- Weekdays only
- Open to beginners
Course information See upcoming dates
Graphic & Web Design Summer Program NYC

Learn graphic and web design this summer in NYC. In this 4-week course, high school students learn Adobe applications, graphic design theory, and web design with HTML & CSS.

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- $3,990
- 100 hours
- Weekdays only
- Open to beginners
- Payment plan available
Course information See upcoming dates

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About Graphic Design & NextGen's Summer Classes

Graphic design is used for major parts of business and creative projects. It’s how we can catch people’s eye, how we express emotion and feeling, and how we can show what we’re all about. Graphic design is used in the creation of apps, websites, logos, games, advertisements, and more. Graphic design is the perfect stepping stone for creative people but it can also be a lucrative career on its own.

Learning graphic design will give you access to careers in almost every industry. If you’re trying to get into marketing, streaming, photography, a career in art, creating patterns for textiles, or animation graphic design is a great place to start. Make your art digital and set yourself up for a creative career.

Why learn Graphic Design in high school?

Learning graphic design in high school will give you lucrative skills for your career but it will also provide a creative outlet. The thing with design, and any creative endeavor, is that you’ll need time to hone your style.

When you first start out, you’re still learning. If you start learning in high school, you’ll know your style and understand how trends work by the time you’re looking for your first career job or ready to launch your own freelance hustle.

What can you create with Graphic Design?

What you can create with graphic design is only limited by your imagination. It can be used for everything from business to hobby projects. You can design tangible items, create digital products, or animate your art.

These days you can find a way to make income off of almost anything if you know how to use the internet and some basic marketing skills. You can have a lucrative side hustle creating logos and brand design or making illustrations. You could work for a company creating graphics for their advertising. Maybe you’ll work for an agency creating product packaging and labels.

There are jobs for the book nerds out there who want to be the ones designing book covers and magazines. Maybe your favorite hobby is cooking, you could design cookbooks! Create graphics for your Youtube channel or tik tok with graphic design.

Whether you want to work for yourself or someone else someday, graphic design is a great skill to set you up for a versatile future – because who knows what you’ll actually be when you “grow up”?

If you love graphic design and want to get even more technical. You could use your digital design skills to design websites. All you need to learn on top of graphic design to start web design is HTML and CSS. Take it to the next level and add JavaScript to become a front end web developer!

Why you should attend a Graphic Design summer camp

Maybe you have a full class load during the school year or you’re really aiming to ace your APs. You might be devoting time to apply to college after school or you play sports. You don’t want to worry about adding another thing to your weekday plate.

Then, summer is the perfect time for you to learn graphic design! Don’t worry, you won’t lose your whole summer. But you will gain skills and friendships that will last a lifetime. Most summer programs are weekdays only, so you’ll still have weekends to spend your free time how you want! You can learn live online or in New York with our graphic design summer programs.

If you start over the summer, you can practice for fun during the school year, start your side hustle early, or start building your portfolio to add to your college applications. You’ll have something to work on while you binge Netflix!

Learn Graphic Design live online over the summer

You can learn graphic design with an online summer course for high schoolers. You’ll learn live online with other high schoolers and a focused, industry-experienced instructor and hands-on projects to build a portfolio by the end of the summer.

This summer camp covers Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. It includes comprehensive instruction on the most essential tools for new graphic designers, the best way to prepare your graphics for how they’ll be used, and understanding which tools you should use for your projects.

If you want to add more technical skills to your plate, or just give you more options for your future, you can learn web design online over the summer instead. This web design summer course for high schoolers goes hand-in-hand with graphic design. You’ll still learn design concepts but you’ll be using Sketch, HTML, and CSS instead of Adobe’s creative software.

If you live near New York City, you can attend a Graphic Design Summer Camp for high school in-person or a high school summer web design camp in-person. These teach the same great curriculum that our online programs do but you’ll get hands-on face-to-face instruction too.

Both of these skills offer desirable careers, opportunities for entrepreneurship, and creative problem-solving. They’re also perfect for beginner designers. Whichever path you choose, there’s a summer camp for it!

Can’t decide which to start with? That’s ok! You can attend the Graphic and Web Design Summer Program for high schoolers to get a comprehensive introduction to both of these awesome topics. You’ll learn all three Adobe applications for design, graphic design theory, web design theory, HTML, and CSS.

Why Graphic Design is perfect to learn after school

We get it, you need your summer! That’s why we also offer after school graphic design courses. Graphic design is a great skill to learn after school. It’s much different than the reading, writing, and math that most of your homework requires you to focus on. You can even use your new graphic design skills to enhance some of your projects or your college applications.

After-school Graphic Design Programs and Private Tutoring

Don’t worry, you’ll still have weekends. These after school classes are hosted on weekdays. You can learn graphic design after school live online. You’ll use the most popular graphic design tools: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Create a portfolio that you can use for college applications or your first entrepreneurial endeavor!

Need extra help with graphic design? We offer one-on-one or small group tutoring on your schedule. If you’re serious about design school or starting your career right away, this is a great option.

Get a head start on Graphic Design

When you take a graphic design course you’ll get a head start on creating print designs from social media ads to logos. You’ll learn how to use the most important tools for digital designers and how to combine these tools for a professional finished product. The graphic design courses we offer don’t involve any coding.

You can take your graphic design one step further with web design, though. This course does involve coding in HTML and CSS. It also uses design software to create the concepts and graphics for your website. This course combines the creative skills of designers with the technical skills of developers to give you a versatile foundation.

Learn Graphic Design at NextGen

Tools like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are hard to learn on your own. Sure, you can try learning from Youtube videos or SkillShare but nothing compares to having a real, industry-experienced person to teach you.

Our instructors are trained to be teachers. They’re using a globally trusted curriculum and workbooks to help you learn the skills you need. They’ll make sure you actually understand and can use your new graphic design skills in the real world, not just hypothetically.

Which Graphic Design Summer Camps is Right for You?

At NextGen Bootcamp, we offer high school students several options to start learning graphic design. This summer, students can choose from our Graphic Design Summer Course and Web Design Summer Course. Both courses are available live online from anywhere, or in-person in New York City. You can interact with the instructor in real-time, ask questions, and let the instructor control your screen.

The graphic design course focuses on creating print designs, including social media ads, logos, brochures, flyers, and more. You'll learn how to layout a variety of documents in InDesign, create logos and illustrations in Illustrator, and edit/retouch photos in Photoshop. In the last part of the course, you'll learn graphic design theory and best practices, and start creating your own project with guidance from top designers. The graphic design course does not involve any coding.

The Web Design Summer Course blends design and coding to allow high school students to create amazing websites from scratch. Students will learn Sketch, the leading application for designing user interfaces. This app allows users to quickly layout webpages before coding. Then participants will progress to coding their websites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Finally, students will learn how to make their projects live for the world to see. The course is beginner-friendly.

Learn More About Graphic Design

Graphic Design is visual communication through artwork or combined images and text. Both print and digital designers use similar processes and similar programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Graphic designers create product packaging, advertising materials in print and digital formats, logos, and much more.

Print designers typically create brochures, business cards, product packaging, subway banners, books, and other physical products or documents.

Graphic Designers use the same programs to develop digital designs such as web banners, social media graphics, and eBooks. In some cases, these designers will use different output formats for printed and digital designs.

In our graphic design summer courses, high schoolers will learn to work with industry-standard tools to create graphic design projects and hone their skills. With our hands-on learning approach, students will learn in classroom instruction and then apply the skills by working on real graphic design projects.

The core Adobe apps designers that will be taught in our graphic design classes are:

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is the industry-standard photo editing app, but you can do a lot more with it than just manipulate photos. It’s very versatile and used by photographers, designers, videographers, and more to edit photos, create graphics, design websites, and build animated GIFs... just to name a few.

Photoshop is one of the standard apps every graphic designer knows. You can use it to create graphics for many types of uses such as social media, web, emails, video, and print. The graphics can contain photos, text, logos, icons, etc. Photoshop can open and export a wide variety of graphic file formats, so you can use it across many industries.

Photoshop is best known as a photo editor. You can do standard image improvements such as adjusting contrast, brightness, color, sharpness, or more advanced things such as moving elements from one background to another, removing unwanted elements, and adding in new elements (like a better face in a group photo). What you can do in Photoshop is only limited by your imagination and your Photoshop skills.

Photoshop also has uses in web design as you can design webpages and optimize graphics for web using Photoshop. Additionally, you create animated GIFs in Photoshop for social media, HTML emails, or any other use.

Adobe InDesign

From long documents (such as books and magazines), to short documents (such as brochures and business cards), InDesign is great at creating layouts that combine text and graphics. InDesign is ideal for creating designs that will be printed but can also be used for digital output such as eBooks, PDF, and more.

InDesign is the king of long documents. You can import content from authors (Word files, Excel documents, etc.), style it, and layout pages. InDesign has many features to help along the way, such as paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, master pages, powerful find/change, tables, footnotes, table of contents, and much more. InDesign can even export eBooks as ePub files, which can be converted into Mobi files for the Amazon Kindle.

Small documents: InDesign can create small documents such as business cards, brochures, and more. InDesign’s amazing typography features are useful in any design that involves type, whether it's a poster or flyer. From one page to hundreds, InDesign is up to the task.

Professional PDFs: InDesign has many features that help you create professional PDFs for print, web, or email. You can also create PDF forms, or add interactive PDF features (which unfortunately do no work well on most mobile devices).

Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is the industry-standard vector graphics and illustration app. Designers and illustrators use it to create logos, web graphics, fashion designs, product packaging, and so much more.

Even if you can’t draw things by hand, there’s still a lot of things you can do with Adobe Illustrator.

Some common uses for Illustrator are:

Drawing & Illustrations: One way to create a vector drawing/illustration is to draw it by hand and then trace it in Adobe Illustrator. You can also draw directly in Illustrator. Having artistic talent helps, but even if you can’t draw well in real life, you can still use Illustrator’s drawing tools to create things you might never have been able to create by hand.
Logos & Icons: It’s important to create logos as vectors, so they can be used at any size. Creating a logo in Photoshop as pixels would be a mistake because you’d limit the quality and size at which you can use the logo. Icons are used in websites, apps, print, and all types of design. Vector images can be scaled without loss of quality.
Web Graphics & social media: Vector graphics can be used in websites as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Social media graphics often require converting your designs into pixel-based PNG or JPEG files, but it can still be easier to work with vectors during the design process.
Fashion Design: Fashion designers often use Illustrator to create patterns (controlling how art repeats within a pattern), explore color, and to show how patterns look in a dress, shirt, pants, etc.
Product packaging: Designers that create packaging appreciate Illustrator’s precision and many graphic features. Amazing typography, graphic effects, ability to import photos, and many more features let packaging designers create the beautiful packaging material that will be printed and used to sell and protect the products we purchase.

What Careers Can You Go Into with Graphic Design?

Upon earning a degree in graphic design, earning a certificate, or developing a portfolio, many graphic designers choose to work freelance or start an agency to do small graphic design jobs for companies that don’t need a full-time graphic designer.

Experienced designers may work as a Creative Director or Lead Designer. Some graphic designers pursue additional training and work as User Experience (UX) or User Interface (UI) Designers specializing in user-centric design. Other designers learn to code and also work as front-end developers that design websites.

Here are a few of the most common roles that graphic designers pursue:

Web Designer - Web designers use text, photos, and graphics to create visually appealing websites. A graphic designer may use web design tools or learn to code a site with HTML, CSS, and other languages.
Package Designer - A package designer may design labels, boxes, and containers for products that represent the brand and also display relevant information about the product.
Digital Designer - A digital designer designs materials for the web including social media posts, websites, blog posts, website ads and banners, reports, and online newsletters.
Logo Designer - Logo designers create logos to represent a concept, product, or service. The logo design may also include a business card or stationery design with the logo.
Brand Identity Designer - The brand identity designer ensures all visual elements of a brand align with the brand’s target consumer and mission statement.
Layout Designer - A layout designer formats books, magazines, newsletters, reports, and other text documents with photos and graphics.
Animation Designer - Some graphic designers use visual design, text, and audio to create videos, commercials, and other interactive designs. Designers may use a video creation tool or code if they have the ability.

Learn Creative & In-Demand Graphic Design skills

Learning graphic design skills can be very empowering and beneficial for your future for a variety of reasons.

Make Your Mark

There are very few career paths that allow you to think outside the box and use creativity with not many limits. As a graphic designer, you’ll be able to create, design, and express many messages that can influence thousands of people.

Spotting something you designed on a billboard or an advertisement is always exciting, especially knowing it’s exposed to such a large audience. You'll have opportunities to work with lots of brands as a graphic designer.

Work Across Industries

Graphic design surrounds us in every part of our lives. When you’re in the shower, there’s graphic design on shampoo bottles; there’s a design on your Colgate toothpaste and so on.

It’s safe to say that graphic designers never run out of work to do. Even more so, graphic designers are wanted in almost every industry, including fashion, warehouses, software, and trade shows. Life as a designer runs on options, and more importantly, choices of who we want to work with and whether we can make their brand stand out.

Focus on a Niche

Another great aspect of graphic design is having the ability to branch out and focus on one category. Graphic designers have broad niches, including logo design, brand identity, flash design, art directing, and even photoshop art. While it’s best to always focus on a niche in your industry, you’ll have a lot of options to start with.

Once you start learning the fundamentals of graphic design, you’ll feel a certain pull or attraction to one specific aspect of graphic design which will help determine your niche. For example, when you start your courses, you may realize you genuinely enjoy designing logos or playing with photoshop and that will be one of your "signs."

In-demand Skills

Graphic designers are becoming more popular due to increasing demand. With so much exposure to billboards, advertisements, and digital promotions, it’s no secret that highly qualified graphic designers are sought after. Due to this positive reality, becoming a graphic designer is not only an exciting career choice, but it also ensures that you won’t run out of projects to pursue and jobs to apply for.

If you prefer to work as a freelancer, there is no shortage of companies looking out for them, too. Whatever you decide, and whichever work environment you prefer to be in, the world is at your fingertips. Once you begin your journey as a graphic designer, remember that you won’t know where you want to specialize right away, and because of the endless choices you’ll have, the decision may be difficult.

Keep working on your skills, building your portfolio, and finding what you like to do most.

10:00am Review & Daily Goals	Review of the previous day’s material and the current day’s goals.
10:30am Micro-Lecture 1	Interactive lecture with short exercises to introduce the first topic of the day.
10:45am Guided Practice	Guided hands-on learning, where students apply the concepts from the previous lecture.
11:15pm Review & Advanced Problem	A quick review of the previous exercise and an advanced problem to focus and solidify the learning.
11:45pm Guided Project Micro-lecture	The instructor lays the foundation for the current project that the students will be working on in the afternoon.
12:15pm Micro Lecture/Continue Coding	Flexible time for the introduction of a new topic or students to continue working depending on the course.
1:00pm End of the Day	Students wrap up their day and instructors answer any final questions.

July 2021
Graphic Design Summer Course Live Online July 6–30 Monday to Friday 10–1pm Online Only	$2,495 57 Hours Live Online	In this graphic design program for High School students, you'll master the most powerful tools in graphic design: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.	Add to cart
Graphic & Web Design Summer Program NYC July 19–August 13 Weekdays 10–4pm	$3,990 100 Hours Live Online	Learn graphic and web design this summer in NYC. In this 4-week course, high school students learn Adobe applications, graphic design theory, and web design with HTML & CSS.	Add to cart
August 2021
Graphic Design Summer Course Live Online August 2–26 Monday to Friday 10–1pm Online Only	$2,495 57 Hours Live Online	In this graphic design program for High School students, you'll master the most powerful tools in graphic design: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.	Add to cart
Web Design Summer Course Live Online August 2–20 Monday to Friday 10–1pm Online Only	$1,999 30 Hours Live Online	Get started in web design with this summer course. Students first learn to build and design webpages by coding HTML & CSS. Students will also learn to create webpage layouts in Sketch, as well as optimize web graphics for hi-res screens and fast downloads.	Add to cart
Graphic Design Summer Camp NYC August 2–13 Monday to Friday 10–4pm	$2,495 50 Hours Live Online	Learn the graphic design theory and the essential Adobe applications, including Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. In this summer course in NYC, high school students work on real-world design projects.	Add to cart
Web Design Summer Camp NYC August 16–27 Monday to Friday 10–4pm	$2,495 50 Hours Live Online	Learn to design websites with Sketch and code the final product with HTML & CSS. In this summer course, high school students learn the essential skills to start designing and developing their own websites.	Add to cart

Live Online Graphic Design Summer Courses

Graphic Design Summer Course Live Online

Web Design Summer Course Live Online

NYC Graphic Design Summer Courses

Graphic Design Summer Camp NYC

Web Design Summer Camp NYC

Graphic & Web Design Summer Program NYC

Join the Top Online Design Courses for High School Students

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