6 Free Graphic Design Courses Online Websites

Learn graphic design with these 10 free graphic design courses online. Build your skills or start your graphic design career.

Are you ready to start your career in graphic design? The good news is that in 2022, you will no longer have to spend a fortune on school fees, or dedicate four years in design school to study design or become a professional graphic designer.

Studying graphic design doesn’t have to be expensive, and you can definitely do it on your own thanks to some of the free, high-quality online courses. In this post, we share the best free graphic design courses online to start your career in a self-taught way. Ready? Let’s go!

1. CalArts Graphic Design Specialization

The California Institute of the Arts offers a wide range of graphic design specialization programs for free through Coursera. These five entry-level courses are each led by faculty members at CalArts and packed with insight from industry professionals.

Through this graphic design specialization, you will learn the basic skills needed to start a career as a professional designer, how to master visual communication and gain a solid understanding of how graphic design plays into other fields such as interface design, motion graphics and editorial. design. Here is a brief overview of each course:

  • Course 1: Fundamentals of Graphic Design
  • Course 2: Introduction to Typography
  • Course 3: Introduction to Image Creation
  • Course 4: Ideas from Graphic Design history
  • Course 5: Brand New

To get free access to course materials, simply choose to audit a class through Coursera.com.

2. Canva Design School: Graphic Design Courses Online Basics

Get a solid graphic design foundation in this short and solid course offered by the folks at Canva. Canva’s Basic Graphic Design Class consists of twelve short lessons, each covering the basic elements of graphic design along with activities that put your new knowledge into practice.

You’ll experience invaluable design knowledge from defining your intended message, creating mood boards, color wheels and typography essentials, and much more. This course is perfect if you don’t have a lot of time to invest in learning a new skill, or just want to jump in the water to gain a better understanding of how to think as a graphic designer.

3. Logo Design Basics

Branding is one of the most fundamental aspects of graphic design, and a specialty that many designers choose to focus on. If you want to dive into the world of brand identity design, Udemy Logo Design Fundamentals is a great place to start.

In this course consisting of fifteen lectures, learn what makes a successful logo design, understand your client’s needs, and build a brand identity system that can be used effectively across a wide variety of different applications. In this branding crash course, you’ll learn everything you need to know to be able to create a successful logo design from start to finish.

4. Introduction to the History of Graphic Design

What better place to start your graphic design learning journey than where it all started? In Introduction to the History of Kadenze Graphic Design, learn all about how design has touched almost everything in our lives—from our society, to our politics, to our ideology.

This History of Graphic Design Courses Online crash course is adapted from the same class taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Dive deeper into the history of design and gain a deeper understanding of Graphic Design’s role in our world, its evolving styles and its revolutionary techniques.

You will be equipped with a solid understanding of what defines successful graphic design and view the profession through a whole new lens.

5. Adobe Illustrator for Beginners

Studying graphic design principles should form the basis of your education. But what’s the point if you can’t put these principles into practice? To really come up with and create great design work, you also need some hard skills—knowledge of a particular design software, for example.

Adobe Illustrator is the software of choice for many designers, and in this three-hour Adobe Illustrator crash course presented by Envato Tuts, instructor Dan Scott explains everything you need to know about the program to start bringing your ideas to life.

Learn the basics of designing custom shapes, lines, and brushes, and also learn how to use and manipulate text, and work your way through creating custom logo marks and icons. You’ll also learn the sneaky secret to creating beautiful color palettes, gradients, and patterns. Plus, the videos will take you through important things like saving and exporting your work for print and the web. There are lots of exercises throughout the course so you can immediately apply what you’ve learned.

6. Fundamentals of Graphic Design: Core Principles of Visual Design

Skillshare also offers free classes covering the five basic principles of Graphic Design in just 35 minutes. This course is for anyone who wants to explore and experiment with images and text to communicate messages. Learn ideas and principles that can be applied to any visual layout from books, magazines, web pages, posters, etc.

This class is taught by the Graphic Design Courses Online MFA program director at the Maryland Institute College of Art, so you’ll see many examples of graphic design projects created by students at MICA. Get ready for a useful crash course in core design elements like symmetry, scale, framing, hierarchies, grids, and finally, put your new learning to the test by creating basic page layouts in your design software of choice.

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