8 Graphic Design Courses for Beginners

Udemy is an online learning platform founded in 2009. It offers courses in a wide range of topics such as business, technology, photography, personal development, music, graphic design, etc. They offer courses for as low as $12.99 and as high as $199.99 with courses on sale at various times throughout the year. From Udemy, I’ve learned design skills such as logo design, icon design, web design, flat design, and typography. Here are eight graphic design courses for beginners that have helped me in gaining graphic design knowledge and skills.

Logo Design

1. Design a Logo for Free in Inkscape

Daniel Evans is a graphic designer from England who specializes in logo designing. He has done design work for Hewlett Packard. Daniel has over 19 years of experience in the design industry. In addition, he has won numerous logo design awards such as the Hiibrand Silver Award, the Wolda Award, and the Amazing Pixels Award.

In the Design a Logo for Free in Inkscape course, you will first need to have Inkscape which is free to download and use.

This course is one of a handful of graphic design courses for beginners Daniel has to offer. In addition, it’s a good course for anyone who wants to experiment with logo design.

2. Inkscape QuickStart – Up and Running Quickly

Dan Webb is a U.S. based graphic designer as well as an illustrator, engineer, and programmer. He has over 25 years of experience throughout these professions.

The Inkscape QuickStart – Up and Running Quickly is another course that uses Inkscape. In this course, you will create four different logos. Also, you will learn different techniques that can be done in Inkscape. Some of the techniques are working with text and tracing a bitmap to make a logo. In addition, Dan teaches you how to create a stamp effect on a logo and how to create a 3D effect on a logo. When you are finished with this course, you will have created four logos, a mockup from a logo, and a business card from a logo.

3. Logo Design in Adobe Illustrator – The Advanced Level

Here is another logo design course by Daniel Evans. Even though the course says advanced, it’s very thorough in describing the logo design process and how to design logos. I felt the need to include it because it was still relatively beginner-friendly. You will need to have Adobe Illustrator to follow the steps exactly as they are in the videos. However, I used Affinity Designer to take this course, and I got the same end results. Here are some of the logos I created throughout the course:

In this course, Daniel walks you through the logo design process from start to finish (such as meeting the client, sketching logos, creating mood boards, preparing the files to send to clients, etc.). You will also learn logo design principles such as applying the Golden Ratio rule and Gestalt principles of perception to your logo designs. In addition, you will learn grid techniques such as the isometric grid and square grid to create logos.

Some other things you will learn throughout this course are how to create a logo design questionnaire, how to enter logos into award competitions, and how to sell logos you haven’t used. The questionnaire helps you in understanding the wants and needs of your clients’ or potential clients’ when designing their logos.

If Daniel’s advanced course sounds too overwhelming, you might want to check out his beginner or intermediate logo design courses.

Icons

4. How to Create App Icons in Affinity Designer

Dawid Tuminski is a graphic designer, a coder, and an educational entrepreneur. He owns a graphic design studio, and he teaches unique design skills such as web design, logo design, Photoshop, Illustrator (and plenty more topics).

For this course, you will need to have Affinity Designer. Dawid will teach you how to make app icons. Once you complete this course, you will have created 15 app icons. Some of the icons created in this course are a tv icon, podcast icon, travel icon, alarm clock icon, and a food icon. You will also get to create a smartphone mockup to place the apps on and an hour and a weather widget. Additionally, you will have gained knowledge on some of the features of Affinity Designer. Those features are the pen tool, gradients, strokes, fills, and transformations. Here are the app icons that I created while following the course:

Badges

5. How to Create Gorgeous Badges in Affinity Designer

Here is another course by Dawid Tuminski. There is an additional instructor in this course named Jeremy Hazel. Jeremy Hazel is a professional graphics artist who started with traditional art (such as pencil and acrylic painting) before transitioning into tattooing then into digital art. He has his own design studio called 7th Seasons Studio.

To do this course, you will need to have Affinity designer too. After finishing this course, you will have created 11 badges, and you will know how to create badges from scratch. Dawid starts the course off, and you will create 5 badges with him. Some of those badges include a tennis club badge and an Italian coffee house badge.

In the second half of the course, you will design badges with Jeremy. With him, you will create 6 badges. Some of these badges are a soccer team badge, a retro badge, and a DJ headphone badge. Also, you will learn some Affinity Designer skills with this course such as how to add effects and blend modes to your projects and how to create color schemes and palettes from scratch. Here’s a soccer badge that I created from one of Jeremy’s projects in the course:

Web Design

6. Web Design in Affinity Designer Masterclass

In this course, Dawid Tuminski will teach you how to create websites using Affinity Designer. You will learn web design principles such as picking the right fonts and colors for your designs, modern web design trends, what makes a good website design, and more. Also, you will create wireframes and grids. In addition, you will create web design elements such as a header, a hero section, a gallery section, and a footer.

When you complete this course, you will have three websites that you can add to your portfolio. These websites include a gallery website, a blog website, and a single blog post page.

Flat Design

7. Modern Flat Design in Affinity Designer Masterclass

Here is yet another course by Dawid Tuminski. With this course, Dawid will teach you how to create flat designs with Affinity Designer. For those wondering what you can do with flat designs, flat designs can be used to create illustrations for infographics, posters, and other design work. Aside from the logo design courses, this flat design course was one of my favorite graphic design courses for beginners.

After finishing this course, you will have created seven modern flat design projects. Plus, you will have learned another skill, and you will have a set of projects to add to your portfolio (and ideas to create your own designs). Some of the projects in this course are a desert island, a mountain scene, a bar scene, and a home office. Here’s the bar scene project I created.

Typography

8. Affinity Designer – Design Artistic Text and Create Fonts

At last, here is the final course on the list. It deals with typography and is taught by Jeremy Hazel. In this course, you will learn how to create fonts and artistic text. You will also learn text composition (how text is placed on a printed page/design or how it’s viewed on the web). Moreover, you will learn how to combine text with images to make a complete design.  

Finally, you will have even more Affinity Designer skills: learn how to place text on a path, learn how to convert text to curves, learn about Affinity Designer’s layers (the mask layer, the pixel layer, and the adjustment layer). Once you complete this course, you will have created about 8 – 10 projects.

Final Thoughts

There you have it! Eight graphic design courses for beginners that can help you jumpstart your graphic design career. I hope that this list of courses was helpful in helping you choose what skill(s) you are interested in learning (or revisiting). Let me know in the comments which courses sound really interesting to you.