Design courses

7 November 2024

As an independent designer without any formal training, one of the ways I’ve tried to keep on top of design knowledge and learn new things is by taking courses. I’ve invested a lot over the years – both in time and money – and thought it might be helpful to share my experiences.

Last update: 11 January 2025

Notes

Courses

Design Systems University (Dan Mall)

The Design Systems University courses share lots of valuable experience and insight that I’ve found incredibly helpful. I started with three free ‘Beginner’ courses before checking out Design Systems 101.

I found these during a project where we needed to build either a component library or design system, and no-one on the team had direct experience of these. These courses were an excellent overview that brought me up-to-speed on various crucial and practically-helpful elements, e.g.:

One thing to note is that Design Systems 101 contains a lot of similar/same material as the free courses. This isn’t a problem per se – the material is all valuable and easy to digest – but I ended up skipping a lot of the paid course material. I didn’t have time to sit through similar-but-not-the-same content and sift out the new information. I may return to it in future.

If I had my time again, I’d have skipped the free stuff and exclusively gone through Design Systems 101.

All-in-all, a top recommendation if you need to quickly get up-to-speed on design systems and want some practical tips on getting started.

Form Design Mastery (Adam Silver)

This course sat in my “to do one day” list for a pretty long time, but I finally had a direct need for it recently and took the plunge. It builds on lots of topics from Adam’s Form Design Principles book, but covers them in more detail with many more practical examples.

Adam’s approach to forms is articulated and reasoned incredibly well. Most of my clients don’t have the opportunity to test at anywhere near the scale or detail of GOV.UK, so there’s a lot of value in seeing these patterns that are based on lots of user research.

I was able to implement a lot of this learning immediately in a client project, and I can see that I’ll be using the principles time-and-time again. Worth every penny.

Good Design Crash Course (Adam Silver)

This free short course is a great reminder/introduction to good high-level design principles.

It’s free, easy to get through in a single sitting and covers good design principles – what’s not to like?

Learn UI Design (Erik Kennedy)

This course was the biggest major investment I made after Typewolf, several years earlier.

It’s incredibly thorough – I’d say it’s appropriate both for new designers and experienced designers looking to sharpen/refine their skills. Erik has some brilliantly useful thoughts on lots of hard-to-nail topics – colour is the obvious one that comes to mind, but there are lots of great tactics/approaches explained throughout.

One thing I particularly liked is how the course challenges some received design wisdom that I’ve been on the fence about for years (e.g. mobile-first, typography scales, etc). It’s never contrarian for contrarian’s sake – Erik takes an incredibly thoughtful and practical approach to everything.

This is not a cheap course and it requires a lot of time to get through the material, but it’s incredibly thorough. Highly recommended.

Practical Accessibility (Sara Soueidan)

I bought this course before I decided to focus on design and move away from frontend development. The target audience is clearly developers, but there are useful things for designers here, too.

As a designer concerned with accessibility, I’ve dipped into this course to look at accessible implementations of things I’m designing before I present them.

Even though this isn’t a design course per se, I’d still highly recommend. It’s useful for designers with and without frontend code skills, and can be a useful thing to point developers to (particularly if you’re working with an in-house team).

Refactoring UI (Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger)

Aimed a developers, this is a pretty thorough introduction to design principles. It’s primarily delivered as lots of rules with plenty of practical examples.

It’s on the more affordable side and covers lots of basics well. I’d say it’s a pretty good course for the target audience and new designers looking for something to get them off the ground.

Stand Out as a Web Designer (Dann Petty)

An easy-to-digest action-packed course covering several techniques to take designs to the next level. Easy to get through the material in a couple of sittings, and lots of high-level takeaways.

Typewolf Typography Checklist (Jeremiah Shoaf)

This was the first higher-value course I bought. I’d read lots of articles and books on typography, so went back-and-forth on whether this would be worth the investment – and it was one of the best purchases I have ever have made.

The checklist is packed full of bitesize tips and presented in a beautifully straightforward and easy-to-understand manner. I recommend this wherever I can. Highly recommended.

Reply by email