What is Graphic Design?

Graphic design is an art of visual communication using techniques such as typography, photography, iconography, and illustration. Graphic design has the power to persuade people. (Source: Google)

Imagine you visited a café for the first time. Other than the food what else lingers in your mind. It is how the café looked. How attractive it looks and what wall and floor designing they have. Every piece of visual art comes under the big umbrella of graphic design.

 How To Begin with Graphic Design:

For any beginner, it might be intimidating to test the waters as the online courses or vocational training is way too costly. As a beginner, you need to first look for a genre that interests you, something that portrays your passion and interest. It is an easy task but needs a lot of practice.

But no worries the world is not such a gloomy place. There are several free online courses and free graphic design study materials that one can refer to. After going through all the online material, you can find your own inspiration that will help you make your portfolio.

The 6 free graphic designing courses available are:

● YouTube: There is no better place for free resources than YouTube. YouTube has a wide variety of channels that offer free graphic design courses from the introductory to advanced level. There are a number of YouTube channels providing detailed videos about graphic design. Every genre of graphic design has a separate channel corresponding to it. If you want to learn hands-on design like hand-lettering or doodling for illustration, you can subscribe to channels. There are also various graphic challenges posted by YouTubers which you can take part in and make designs alongside your mentor.

● Udemy: Udemy is an online education application. It majorly focuses on skill development like learning new software or more hands-on projects. Very rarely it has theory classes in it. This is the best place to learn any software. However, the classes are too expensive but there are few free graphic design courses that are pretty good.

● Skillshare: Another favorite website for self-learned graphic designers is skillshare. It specializes in providing software and practical knowledge. A two-month trial free graphic design course is available and quite useful. This is enough to learn the basics of graphic design.

● Eduonix: This website has recently launched a free graphic design course. It is an amalgamation of theory and practical knowledge. There are various types of free resources posted here.

● Shaw Academy: Shaw academy has recently launched a ten-day free course that only specializes in Graphic design. It is a basic beginner-level course and is available live. You can ask questions from the instructors and get answered.

● Coursera: Every designer needs to know the theory of the design as well as how to do it. If you do not know which color suits which design or the history of the typeface you have used or which shapes are more comfortable for the viewers, then the designer has failed to do his job. Coursera has a wide variety of theoretical courses. After the pandemic, Coursera has made all its graphic design courses free. Even if it is not free then one can audit it. Auditing is the best way to use this application. The resources are the same and the assignments are also present. After completing all assignments one could make their portfolio from it.

Lastly, learning any new skill need time, patience, and more importantly determination. If you are rigorous through the process and utilize all these free resources you are good to go. Also once you have learned the basics do not wait to learn more. Start working as an intern or as a graphic designer. 90% of the designers have learned design by working. Only after you have worked for a while and have a set of good designs, make a portfolio. This will ensure that you have successfully learned graphic design.