Ask HN: Any good graphic/web design courses online?

7 points by crystalarchives 14 years ago | 3 comments

I'm a backend developer who's seen a lot of quality stuff for teaching programming, for example: * CodeSchool * Udacity * TeamTreeHouse * OpenCourseWare (MIT, Stanford)

My Googlefu is letting me down so I was just wondering if the community knows of any similar resources for designers to hone their craft since I'm not really versed in that community?

the-cakeboss 14 years ago |

I don't know of anything analogous to codeschool and the like, and I am having a hard time imagining such a thing. Design is in many ways comprable to coding. It encompasses many different skill sets and disciplines. Designers are like programmers in that they must research, understand a problem, visualize, iterate, organize, implement, optimize, etc etc etc. Design can be hugely complex or rather simple, just like coding.

I am not that familiar with the offerings of codecademy etc, but I tend to doubt that anything taught there can replace experience and serious study of algorithms and patterns. So while I suppose there could be a site teaching about fundamentals of composition, line, form, color, typography, etc, I'd think you'd be better off reading a book on those than anything else. Any exercise you would do would have to be evaluated algorithmically, which seems very hard judging by the subjective nature of design.

Like coding most growth in design happens through actually doing it. This means developing drawing skills, rapid prototyping skills, and most importantly your eye. I don't think any of this can be adequately taught through an interactive website. My suggestion to you would be to simply begin designing.

Hope that helps...

dtromero 14 years ago | |

To continue with this train of thought, I'd check out the webdesign tuts. They have a lot of step by step tutorials to help you get started. Many are super basic, but they are supposed to give you the foundation to develop your own. They also have some articles that break down why some designs are good and others aren't.

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/

kkt262 14 years ago |

My best advice for you is to look at good designs and figure out why they are so good. Then try to replicate them in your own way.

Whenever I start on a design I gather several reference layouts so my mind can think about how to best put things together.

Then get great feedback from other designers. I happen to have a lot of friends in the space that help me.

Check out http://www.thebestdesigns.com for inspiration.