Get value from online graphic design courses

As with everything else you do in life, even if you are already extra rich, you should seek value when taking courses in graphic design. When you spend money on something inferior and of poor value, you are simply encouraging subcontractors to keep ripping people off, wasting your money, and pro, baby wasting your time as well.

In this article, we look at the various options available to help you achieve the desired result in the least amount of time at the lowest cost. These criteria are important because the value determination is determined by the following formula:

1. First, you must clearly state why you want to study

People undertake studies for all kinds of reasons. By knowing why you want to do this study, which will take up some of your time and can cost money (c + t), you can more easily determine the desire for the outcome (do), and all three of these are necessary to calculate the value (v).

Typical reasons why people want to study:

• Learning new skills
• To gain prestige
• To help get a job
• To improve the prospects for marketing
• For a sense of accomplishment
• To eliminate boredom

These reasons can be categorized as follows:

You may have other reasons as well, but you should be able to easily find out if the reasons are for yourself or for others. These categories can seem confusing. You might think getting a job is something you do for yourself, as well as getting a promotion and earning prestige. It's true, you (sometimes) benefit from all of these things, but that's not the point. What we are talking about here is whose expectations are met.

If you want to frame it in simple terms, if your desired result is to get a job, then you do not really care about the qualification, you simply get it to get what you want (so it is secondary to your real goal). You get a degree because you think the employer you want to work for expects you to have it. The same goes for prestige. In that case, your primary goal is to impress other people, and qualification is simply a way to achieve that goal.

When the only expectations you are trying to meet are your own (gain new skills, achieve something and eliminate boredom), the situation is completely different. In this case, you care more about what you study and learn than the paper you receive at the end of it.

So be honest with yourself when deciding the reason for your decision to study, as it will help the rest of the process.

Then decide what you can afford to invest in your education

Tuition costs can range enormously from $ 0 to over $ 100,000. The primary cost determinations are how, where, and what you study. Since you are reading this article, we can already be pretty sure that what you want to study is something related to graphic design, so that it only leaves how and where you are going to work.

When it comes to the question of where it makes a difference. For example, the National University of Singapore is ranked far above UC San Diego (with as many as 15 places), but you can not expect an employer in Frumpburg, Arizona to know such a thing if you do not point it out. Ironically, the same situation can arise for jobseekers in Singapore, where the Singaporean employer may incorrectly consider the American degree to have a higher value than one earned locally.

That is why it was so important to determine the reason for the study. If your reason is from the left column, the quality of the education you receive in Singapore is considered by the experts to be better than what you would get in a very large number of American academic institutions. But if the reason was from the "For Others" column and you live in the United States, you might think that studying even in a low-ranking American institution provides more value.

Next, you will face the challenge that if you decide to study online, while much has improved recently, there is still a stigmatized connection, which is dramatically illustrated in Better Call Saul when Charles openly expresses his contempt for Jimmy when it is revealed that he got his degree from the University of American Samoa (go Land Crabs!), although Jimmy pointed out that the university was accredited.

The reality is that, provided this was a real-world scenario, Jimmy's right to practice law would be no less than Charles', even though Charles graduated from a prestigious American Ivy League university, and Jimmy studied by distance learning at night while spending his days in the work in the mailroom. Both universities were accredited and all attorneys in New Mexico take the same degree. Pass the bar, you're a lawyer. It should be that simple. And yet there is still an obvious stigma around distance education and not just in TV countries.

If your reason for studying was a reason for the left column, an online study should be your number one option. It is much more comfortable and the quality of teaching is not inferior. It's also often much more economical, and in some cases, it's even free (more on that later).

If your reason was a reason for the right column, it could be a little more complicated. Generally speaking, your certificate, diploma, or degree is not meant to look different whether you complete your course through distance learning or not, but in practice, it does sometimes. Most of the time it does not. The second thing is the name of the supplier. Stanford University makes a little more impressive than Uncle Roy's School of Visual Design & Horse Dentistry. In the US, Canada, and Australia, it can also add value if your education provider includes the name of a state or province in their institutional name. Private schools and colleges, other than the Ivy League, are the most likely to get the look of ridicule.

All that being said, and prestige aside, no training course will clear your bank balance faster than taking a course on campus at an American Ivy League University. Joint colleges and small private colleges or training centers are much cheaper, and as long as they are accredited, you still get the same letter string after your name. If you are a left-wing column, maybe even accreditation is not that great, because your main interest is what you learn, not what you get.

Some non-accredited education providers or certification providers are respected equally and sometimes even more than a corresponding accredited degree institution. Fortunately, in graphic design, your portfolio is usually more interested in someone than where you studied.

Decide how much time you can invest in training

Do you need a job next month? Starting a four-year degree probably doesn't help much (it can help a little, though). Short-term certifications are important if you need quick results to achieve a goal that is not directly related to education.

Otherwise, it's about how it affects your life and your work. If you are already busy, it will be difficult to add studies at the top, but many do not make it. My own experience suggests that it is very difficult, but it depends on the courses you take.

This must also be said: if you can afford to take more time, do it. The longer you take to finish the workout, the less pressure you will feel. Stress can block your creativity, and in an area where more of your judgment is likely to be on what you produce than an academic exam, you do not want to be blocked.

For students on the left, free courses and self-study are usually the best choices

Many free courses are as good as paid courses and some are even better. You can also find cheap courses at places like Udemy, and these are sometimes much more productive and less timeless than formal academic courses. If the main value lies in what you learn and not what you earn, then go ahead and do cheap or free courses, gain the knowledge and move on to doing what you love.

5. Convert what you have learned in the free or cheap courses into actual college credits

If you pay attention during your training and learn something, you can convert your knowledge and skills into college credits in two ways.

The first, which is cheaper, is to obtain credit through research. For this, you pay a small fee and take an exam. Pass the exam and you will get points. Some universities even allow you to earn your entire degree this way.

The second way to earn credit is through portfolio assessment, but it is usually very expensive, and unlike if you pass an exam, they are not required to give you any credit that their work in their opinion is not worth getting credit.

6. For high-column students, formal academic courses are more appropriate

If you get excellent degrees and transcripts without caring if you are learning something of value, formal education provides what you need. For you, earning that paper (or at least getting it) is more important than the education itself. What you now probably want to do is get that qualification as quickly as possible.

Let's start with the situation where the qualification you pursue is an actual college or university level. If you are still in high school and smart enough, you can sign up for college courses at school and start earning college credits before graduating from high school. This is a great way to track fast and a way that is often overlooked, usually because students do not know it is possible.

Then, if you already have a high school diploma, you can earn points through graduation and portfolio assessment (see point 5 above), you do not have to do every class in the program.

7. For a job in graphic design, a university degree is often enough

While in most professions, a full bachelor's or master's degree is desirable, graphic designers will not normally have problems hiring with much less, especially if they have a strong portfolio or good test to show. The diploma is only to satisfy the HR department of a large company that hires an "expert" who is not a total slacker. If you want to be even lazier, some colleges offer an Associate Diploma, which you can get in just one year. Now imagine if you served Assoc. Dip. with most of your points earned through graduation. Quite often, all you need to satisfy the HR administrator is that you are a serious applicant, and from that point on, your portfolio makes the rest of the calls.

8. You do not even need a diploma or certificate

If you know that you are a fantastic designer and you do not think you need any training to prove it, you can bypass the whole singing and dancing routine by joining a professional association. It is not guaranteed to work in terms of getting you past HR manager review, but it often does.

What this means is that you can list on your resume something similar:

Medlem I American Institute of Graphic Arts

Sometimes it is simply assumed that you did much more to qualify for that status than to pay $ 150 to AIGA. There are many similar organizations around the world. It works because HR executives are often members of management organizations where you normally have to qualify to be a member, so they just assume that everyone who is a member of a professional organization had to work as hard as they did ... if you ' you are lucky!

9. Just because I told you how to take shortcuts does not necessarily mean I should

Being an artist and being a designer is not the same thing, even though many people think they are. To truly be a designer, you need to be as much of an engineer as you are an artist. Most people do not have what it takes to be an engineer but at least some education.

Being a great graphic designer means not only knowing how to use a certain illustration technique but also why and when to use it. These are things you normally only learn over time by studying a lot of theories, including psychology, color theory, and sometimes even physics. Depending on your specialty, you will probably also want to do all kinds of technology classes and learn to use the advanced tools of the trade. Taking shortcuts means you can miss a lot of it and in the end may never reach your full potential as a designer.

10. Free short courses worth exploring

Do you remember at the beginning of the article when I showed you that equation? You know, the one where value equals cost and time is divided by the desirability of the result? Well, if you can make the cost equal to zero and the time as short as possible, while the desirability of the result is still relatively high, then it must be just as great. Here is a summary of some free short courses that you can consider:

• Alison - Visual & Graphic Design Course. It is a 3-hour course (study at your own pace) with an assessment at the end and the chance to get a non-accredited certificate. The course covers an excellent selection of basic skills required for competence in graphic design. If you want, you can complete an entire (non-accredited) diploma course and buy a nice diploma to hang on your wall.

• Udacity - Introduction to the design of everyday things. This takes two weeks to complete, but it is an in-depth introductory course taught by design professionals who will equip you with the principles of design.

• Coursera - Introduction to typography. Learned by Anther Kiley on behalf of the California Institute of the Arts, this 4-week Coursera course will give you a detailed understanding of fonts and the science of typography. Yep, you invest a whole month just learning about type, but you'll be amazed at how much you can learn about that topic and how useful it will be for you as a designer.

• Coursera - User research and design. It would be nice if this course teaches you how to design a user, but unfortunately, the title is just bad semantics. The course has a large number of instructors from the University of Minnesota, and although it mainly focuses on web designers and software UI designers, it will give you insight into how the audience responds to design and how they think about the elements of a design. Like most Coursera courses, this also requires an investment of 4 weeks, but it is free.

• Coursera - Graphic design. The course's "no-nonsense" title lets you know what you are getting from the beginning. It is taught by David Underwood of the University of Colorado Boulder. The course progresses well during the second and third weeks, where you learn a lot of important techniques and theories.

• edX - Natural History Illustration. This one is a little different. The supplier is the University of Newcastle (in Australia). Even if it is not aimed at beginners or all suitable for them, if you can already draw, this course will teach you some of the high-level techniques used to sketch the natural world. Even if it is not specifically about graphic design, the knowledge and knowledge can be transferred. Learn to draw and color a butterfly perfectly, and you can create all kinds of other things with the same skill set.

In addition, you will find many websites online (such as the one you are currently reading) that offer free tutorials on all things related to design. You may have to go through a lot of low-quality lessons before you discover real gold, but that's the trade-off you need to make when you get something for free.