Our flexible, 8-week online course provides foundations in responsive web design, user interfaces and branding. It’s aimed towards those who want to improve their digital design skills, understand what makes designs effective and design with confidence.
You’ll learn visual design elements, principles and hierarchy; the branding process (from research to final design + how to deliver branding guidelines); how to choose colors and typefaces; practical tips and ways to improve your UI design skills; how to design for responsive experiences across multiple device types, and a whole lot more!
Whether you’re totally new to design or just want to refresh and improve your digital design skills, our Visual Design + Branding course provides a unique, practical design foundation.
What you’ll learn
Design principles + practical user interface tips to help you design better right away
An end-to-end branding process — how to design your own brand and create brand guidelines for handoff
How to design responsive experiences for desktop and mobile from scratch
How to create a design system and a user interface library of components
Best practices for handoff and how to keep design consistent across teams
How to present your work and talk through your design decisions with confidence
Requirements
A computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) with the latest version of Chrome installed and a broadband internet connection.
Our course is not program-specific, but we will be teaching in Figma because it’s free and available for both Mac and Windows users.
Target Audience
Anyone who wants to better understand the fundamentals of digital design, branding and improve their skills.
You can be brand new to design and want a solid understanding of how to see and think like a designer, and create effective designs from scratch, or you can be a current designer, developer or someone working with design who wants to improve your processes and design with confidence. We'll teach you how to design with code in mind, so that you can work better with developers too.
Welcome to the course! In our first week, we’ll cover a concise design history and break down the design elements and principles. You’ll learn about important design milestones throughout history to deepen your understanding and appreciation of design.
This week we'll learn about grids, layout and visual hierarchy. We'll design wireframes for two pages for a city guide website called The Block. This project will continue into Week 3, when we finish the design by applying color, images and icons!
This week, we’ll cover the second half of Visual Design Fundamentals. You’ll learn best practices for creating color palettes, choosing and pairing typefaces and how to design with accessibility in mind. Plus a bit on working with photography and icons!
This week, we'll cover what a brand is, what makes them successful and break down the end-to-end branding process. For our project, we'll choose a social good cause to create a brand for.
This week, we’ll continue working on our social good brand. We'll translate our logo into a full visual identity. Once we've designed all our brand elements, we'll package everything up neatly into brand guidelines!
We'll take our completed brand to design the desktop version of our website. We'll learn best practices for web + UI design, responsive designing, tips for designing with code in mind, how to work with and hand off to developers using Figma prototypes.
This week you’ll take your desktop web designs and optimize them for mobile. We also have a guest lecturer this week, Rik (coder, teacher and SuperHi CEO!) to talk us through how to design with code in mind and work better with developers.
In our final week of the course, we’ll complete a capstone project. The brief is find a print publication without an online presence and use it to inspire your final project — a digital experience of some kind.
Milan is a branding and design freelancer based in Brooklyn! She previously worked at creative agencies in Brooklyn, with early-stage startups in Santiago, Chile and was part of the SuperHi team.
Kristen is a Toronto-based senior visual designer at Glitch, a site for making websites from scratch. She previously worked for as a visual designer for SuperHi, Nike and Huge.