Graphic design is an increasingly important part of every kind of creative’s toolkit. If you’re working in the visual industry, having an understanding of the Adobe Suite, especially Photoshop and the foundations of design is important for giving your work that extra edge–especially in a competitive market where AI is readily available. For illustrators and artists, graphic design is a fundamental part of the job and careers—all the more reason to keep expanding your design skills and knowledge.
In the age of the internet, improving your skills doesn’t have to mean going back to school. There are a number of online graphic design courses offered by universities, graphic design experts, and online course hubs like Udemy, that can help you hone your skills.
We’ve gathered the best free graphic design courses out there to help budding designers and other interested creatives upskill on the foundations of typography, color, and essential graphic design software.
CalArts Graphic Design Tutorial For Beginners
An 11 hour beginner course for graphic design presented by the California Institute of Design, this is an incredible resource offered for free on YouTube. A recorded series of lectures, tutorials and history, this is like getting the academic experience without the crippling debt.
Graphic Design CRASH-COURSE (Master The Psychology of Shapes)
Approaching from and emphasizing the psychology of design, this course from Satori Designs establishes the emotional qualities of shapes, and how they can influence the call to action of your design.
This makes a perfect foundational course when starting out from a state of knowing what you want to say with your design but questioning how.
With strong visual examples of each shape and its psychological impact, this will make you see design differently.
Alison Online
Alison’s stated goal is to make it possible for anyone to study any subject, marketing itself as a new world of free certified learning. Learners can start from anywhere, at any subject level, for free. That said, it is a for-profit company, so the site does offer premium subscription plans that unlock additional features.
The site is full of different types of courses that often lead to earning a test-based certificate. Having a certificate in a subject can actually go a long way to securing a job or freelance opportunity, so adding qualifications to your CV is not a bad idea. While it’s free to take any of the courses on Alison, there is a charge if you want a certificate.
Largely presented in slideshows, the courses on Alison are meant for learning in small manageable chunks.
Udemy
Offering courses taught by independent instructors, Udemy is a competitive classroom marketplace. Classes are priced according to the instructor’s experience and skill, and rated by students; highlighting the quality of the course. You can always search for free courses, though there are frequent sales on the site.
This free course on Design Theory may just be the key to understanding the fundamentals. The site makes it easy to browse through course offerings by category.
The Principles of Design
This free course brilliantly illustrates the fundamentals of design. Moving through balance, pattern, rhythm and into more complex topics like harmony and proportion. Each lesson has a short video, and text to accompany it, making it a fairly accessible introduction that will suit multiple learning styles.
Veerle’s Graphic Design Blog
Veerle Pieters is a Belgium-based graphic/web designer with a website dedicated to all things graphic design. She has experience designing everything from marketing and branding to logos, stationery, and brochures, as well as websites and intranet user interfaces.
With a wide selection of articles with tutorials, tips, and tricks to help you learn graphic design, she includes helpful insight on working with clients and developing a portfolio, as well as simple solutions to problems many graphic designers might face. Most importantly for the new designer, Veerle offers tutorials and tips for using design software.
This blog is delightfully well-designed and is worth a visit even if you’re just looking for inspiration.
Envato Tuts+ Illustration and Design Courses
Envato has created a dense and helpful tutorial archive to help with almost any software and process in design. A gamut of topics run from Illustrator, Photoshop, Cinema 4D, to Rhino.
There are over 1,000 courses and how-to tutorials in Envato’s design and illustration database. And browsing through them all is a breeze since the database lets you choose categories such as the specific software or design process. Filter the results by skill level for an experience most suited to your stage of learning.
Creative Pro
Creative Pro is an online design magazine with a helpful How-To section for learning graphic design. Most of the videos and articles are for experienced designers with specific problems to solve. These articles focus on common challenges that designers face and they provide pro tips on how to overcome them. The archive of articles is searchable, so if you have a topic in mind, it’s not too hard to find what you’re looking for.
This is a great resource for anyone who’s seeking to learn graphic design for free. Beginners could pair these more specific how-to articles with some of the other resources listed here for a well-rounded, self-led education in graphic design.
Fundamentals of Creative Design from Coursera
This introduction to design is offered through the California Institute of Arts on Coursera. Coursera offers online courses from a wide range of institutions, public and private.
The Fundamentals of Creative Design is a great starting point as it covers topics from typography and image-making, to shape, color, and composition. All of the courses in CalArt’s graphic design specialization are worth checking out, as they delve into each of those topics in more detail.
One thing that sets these graphic design classes apart from many of the other options out there is that they are much more than just slideshows. Instead, they include a combination of video lessons, readings, and practice exercises.
If you want to be graded by an expert and earn a certificate for completing the course, you need to register for the course and then purchase the course materials. You can also search through the website to locate different experts who match your preferred teaching method.
Pro tip, you can get access to all of the course content for free by selecting “audit the course” when you sign up (avoid the “free trial” offer as it just means you start paying after seven days).
The quality of these courses and the ability to access all of the content for free makes them an ideal way to learn graphic design.
Demystifying Graphic Design: How Posters Work From Skillshare
Skillshare is an online learning platform that offers courses on a wide range of topics. There are over thousands of courses available from marketing to branding and graphic design to videography. With the promotion of a one-week free trial, it’s possible to be selective and complete a course within the free window.
Ellen Lupton’s course, Demystifying Graphic Design: How Posters Work, is one of the most popular, with over 41,000 students, this short one-hour class explores how posters work and explores moves that make modern graphic design so compelling.
Bonus. A Brief History of Typography
Typography is key to the work of a graphic designer. Within projects featuring this element, each font will add a different feeling to a design. So choosing a typeface can make or break your design project.
This well-designed free pdf serves as evidence of its own wisdom. Within it is a comprehensive but easy to digest introduction to the history and nuances of typography including the 100 best typefaces, explainers on classifications and characteristics of type, and suggested reading. While this is not a graphic design course by any stretch, it deserves a place on this list because it could be invaluable to any design student as an evergreen guideline.
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