Best Online Design Courses for Remote Workers
Find some of the best online design courses for remote workers here. From marketing to web development, design is a key component in a wide variety of modern career paths. Learning the basics could be a smart move for anyone trying to round out their skillset. Whether you’re using Photoshop on a daily basis, or you just want to be a better judge of quality design, these courses can help improve your design skills.
University of Minnesota | Coursera | $49 per month | 14 hrs
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This course provides an introduction for the beginners on the principles of user interface design. This course discusses both the benefits of good design, and the costs of bad design using a series of case studies and practical examples to illustrate the principles being taught.
Several quizzes and assignments are also provided to help students practice their new skills, and these assignments are peer-graded, which provides an opportunity for valuable feedback. After the first two weeks of the course gives students an introduction to user interface design principles, the last two weeks of the course discuss psychology and human factors for user interface design.
University of Maryland, College Park | edX | Free | 12 hrs
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To design a great product, it is important to know what the customer wants. This course will help an introductory product designer better meet their customers’ needs. This theoretical, yet newcomer-friendly, course will introduce the students to lean UX, designs, sketches, wireframes, prototypes, and how to use them. After that, the course walks through the steps of product design and talks about how they are affected by the user experience, beginning with concept generation and selection and moving on to prototyping, wireframing, testing, and troubleshooting.
The course concludes with a discussion of general project management principles. Cait von Schnetlage, a faculty member at the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, leads the course.
Fundamentals of Graphic Design
California Institute of the Arts | Coursera | $49 per month | 15 hrs
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This course provides a great introductory course both for those looking to get into a graphic design career and for those simply wishing to incorporate better graphic design into their own work. The course provides lots of practical opportunities and exercises for students to apply the principles they are learning in the provided videos.
The course instructor, Michael Worthington of the California School of the Arts, divides graphic design into four categories and devotes each of the four weeks of the course to one of these categories. Week one discusses graphic design as it relates to images, and week two discusses graphic design as it relates to typography and setting type. Week three discusses the fundamentals of shape and color, and the course wraps up with a week four discussion of the fundamentals of composition, which includes concepts such as visual concepts and cropping.
Adobe’s website provides a wide selection of Illustrator tutorials for learners from beginner to advanced. The tutorials are brief videos that can be watched at the student’s own pace, and blank templates and exercises are included so students even can practice while learning.
Topics covered include creating and editing shapes, changing color and strokes, adding text to designs, creating a text-based layout, and using the Paintbrush and Pencil tools.
Adobe’s website provides InDesign tutorials for learners from beginner to expert. The tutorials are short videos that can be watched at the student’s own pace in any order, and blank templates are provided so students have a place to practice the skills they learn in this course.
Topics covered include working with graphics and frames, working with tables, applying page layout techniques, adding and formatting text projects, and creating layouts with graphics projects.
California Institute of the Arts | Coursera | $49 per month | 24 hrs
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For designers specifically looking into the game design field, this course is a fun introduction. This course is largely theoretical. The first week of this course covers the principles of very simple games (such as Tic-tac-toe), what makes them work, and why they are popular.
Later in the course, you will learn how game mechanics work, how to tell a story through your game, and the roles of friends and enemies in a game. Fran Krause, a California School of the Arts instructor who has a background in character animation, leads this course.
Sometimes there is no better place to start than the source. If you’re hoping to build your design career with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe’s website provides a variety of Photoshop tutorials for learners at all skill levels from beginner to advanced. The tutorials are generally short videos that can be watched in any order at the student’s own pace, and blank templates and other downloads are provided so students even have a place to practice their newly learned skills.
Topics covered include changing image size, adjusting image quality, cropping photos, adjusting the intensity of colors in a photo, and specific tutorials about using Photoshop on an iPad as opposed to a computer.
California Institute of the Arts | Coursera | $49 per month | 8 hrs
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This course focuses specifically on the typographic area of graphic design. For people learning how to design type in ways that will most effectively reach their audience, this course is a good fit. Typography predates modern graphic design by several hundred years, and as a result, its rules are quite different in some cases.
Topics covered in the first two weeks of the course include the way a typeface design can tell a story to a user and the historic evolution of typographic forms. After students gain this basic theoretical understanding, the second two weeks of the course are about practically applying the rules of typographic design. Students will learn about topics including how the spaces between letters and lines can be manipulated to tell a story and how typography can be practically applied to manipulate the meaning of modern documents. Quizzes are provided along the way for students to apply the skills they are learning, and students will have the opportunity to complete a full-scale typographic poster at the end of the course.
Introduction to Web Accessibility
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) | edX | Free | 20 hrs
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Making your website or app accessible to as many different groups of people as possible is important for all web designers, and this course provides a strong introduction in how to do just that. The W3C Consortium created web accessibility guidelines that are in use across the internet, and four instructors from W3C help teach this course in a practical, hands-on way to beginning web designers.
Topics covered include the principles of accessibility, checking web pages for accessibility issues, finding appropriate resources to implement accessibility, and improving accessibility across the organization. Following the principles taught in this course will help your website provide the best user experience for all users.
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