
Explore how alignment uses left, right, and center alignments and strong guiding lines to bring order to content, avoid chaos, and guide the viewer.
Explore serif, sans serif, script, and decorative typeface styles with practical examples like Times New Roman, Georgia, and Century Gothic, and learn about font resources and licensing.
Learn to establish a concise typeface hierarchy by selecting a small set of fonts that reflect the design message, then build harmonious font combinations for headings and body text.
Explore how color communicates mood and guides viewer perception, using red, yellow, blue, and their mixes to build a cohesive palette that reinforces your design message.
Discover how hypertext markup language (HTML) provides page structure and cascading style sheets (CSS) handles styling, and why hand coding by hand isn’t rocket science for designers.
Compare getting a graphic design job versus freelancing, and learn to differentiate through specialization (logo, branding, mobile, interface design), basic coding, and end-to-end project management to land work.
Download the project files for the Photoshop section here.
Explore the difference between raster and vector graphics, learning how raster uses pixels and is resolution dependent, while vector relies on math and scales without quality loss.
Explore common raster graphic file formats in photoshop, including psd, jpeg, gif, png, and tiff, and learn how each preserves layers, color, transparency, and sharing potential.
Master creating new documents in Photoshop with customizable dimensions, units, resolution, color modes, and presets; learn to manage documents as tabs or floating windows and use keyboard shortcuts.
Master the fundamentals of selections in Photoshop, using the rectangular marquee tool to create precise areas, refine with marching ants, zoom with spacebar, and constrain shapes with shift and alt.
Practice elliptical selections by mastering circular and oval tools, watch the marching ants, and adjust with the space bar and shift to create centered selections for copy, paste, or filters.
Learn to combine Photoshop selection tools with the free transform command to rotate, scale, and move a floating selection (marching ants), preparing for layers.
Graphic design has always been a popular profession, but with more and more technology being introduced into our lives it's becoming an ever more important one too. All kinds of people use all kinds of technology every day. Making that technology as user-friendly as possible is vital, and graphic design is one of the most important elements of this.
The Ultimate Crash Course on Graphic Design
Graphic Design for All
This course is aimed at aspiring graphic designers, web designers and digital artists who wish to develop a skill set needed to become a professional graphic designer. Suitable for both complete beginners and those who already have some knowledge of the industry; this course will prepare you for a career as a graphics designer through familiarising you with the concepts, principles and – most importantly – the software you'll need to know.
You'll learn everything from working with layers and selections in Photoshop, to formatting text and menus in Dreamweaver, to using pathfinders and special effects in Illustrator.
As well as equipping you with a valuable skill set, you will also learn how to get your foot in the door of the graphic design world, from how to land your first job, to finding continued inspiration, to the ins and outs of joining the graphics design community.
On completion of this course, you will have the strong foundation needed to get started in the world of graphic design, along with the skills needed to start working professionally straight away.
Tools Used
Adobe Photoshop: Used for editing and manipulating photographs and images. Improve lighting and colour, add special effects, remove blemishes, create your own images from scratch, and more.
Adobe Illustrator: The standard software for graphics design, and where you do the majority of your work. Create any kind of vector art or illustration your mind is capable of thinking up!
Adobe Acrobat: Transform your work into a format than anyone can view - a PDF. This program also enables you to create, manipulate, print and manage your finished project files.
Adobe Dreamweaver: Design and develop beautiful websites with ease, complete with both a design view and code editor so you can see changes you make on all sides in real time.