Learn Graphic Design

“What business needs now is design. What design needs now is making it about business.”
—Beth Comstock, Former SVP of GE

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More than ever, design is an essential component of good business strategy. As companies around the globe fight to cut through the noise of digital channels, businesses of all kinds need to trust their graphic design teams to deliver value by elevating and clearly communicating their brands and the values they stand for.

While graphic design isn’t new, it’s clear that the demand for effective design in the business world is ramping up significantly. Companies are already creating twice as many designed assets than the days before digital and social media, and this will likely increase as new platforms emerge.

For most businesses, finding enough graphic designers with the specific skills they require is a difficult task. This is where learning and development leaders can step in and play an essential role by developing a skilled design team from within.

Why is this important? If your workforce has a clear path to learn graphic design, this can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Studies show that design-driven companies outperform the S&P 500 by 219% and, by fostering creativity, gain 1.5x greater market share than competitors.

With the right approach to graphic design training, you can help your organization become a design-driven brand!

What Does It Take to Learn Graphic Design?

Types of Graphic Design Software

The Core Skills for All Graphic Design Career Paths

Learning Paths for Graphic Design Training

What Does It Take to Learn Graphic Design?

It’s important to support your existing graphic design talent, but design training doesn’t have to be limited to graphic designers. Especially in the digital marketing space, graphic design is a valuable skill that provides employees with a competitive advantage in the job market. Talent development leaders should focus on providing a clear path to learn graphic design for those in all types of roles because at its core, design is visual communication, an essential skill that everyone today should have.

For many beginners, graphic design training may seem intimidating. Unlike more concrete skills, design implies a degree of creativity that many people incorrectly think is inherent as opposed to learned. Everyone uses creativity on a daily basis, and improving creativity skills just takes training and practice.

Types of Graphic Design Software

In today’s digital age, the rise of graphic design as a practice goes well beyond creativity and artistry to include a complex technical side as well. As a result, there’s more to creating brand identities and crafting marketing collateral than just coming up with creative ideas. Software is the essential piece required to make creative ideas a reality.

Some of the most important tools to include in your graphic design training include:

Adobe Illustrator:

As the world’s leading vector illustration software, Illustrator offers a flexible tool for creating print, web, and app-related assets. Online graphic design courses covering Illustrator should explain elements of the software like artboards, workspaces, layers, shapes, vectors, and more.

Adobe InDesign:

Another essential design tool, InDesign helps graphic designers with page layouts. Graphic design training should use InDesign classes that focus on customizing the workspace, managing documents, working with text frames, creating interactive PDFs, formatting copy, and more.

Adobe Photoshop:

The old graphic design mainstay, Photoshop allows people to edit and refine their work. Help your workforce understand everything from the basic admin aspects of Photoshop to more advanced actions like formatting, retouching, image editing, preparing web graphics, and more.

These are just three primary applications in a graphic designer’s toolkit. As you help your workforce learn graphic design, they’ll provide a solid foundation and the skills needed to unlock business value for your company.

The Core Skills for All Graphic Design Career Paths

Completing a degree in graphic design doesn’t lead to just one career path. From Creative Director to Product Designer, Multimedia Designer, Web Designer, Animator, Video/Film Editor, Brand Identity Designer, and beyond, there are many exciting possibilities!

This complexity can create challenges for talent development leaders. How do you develop a training program that properly supports so many different paths and roles? The short answer is to have a deep library of online design courses at the ready.

But beyond having all the right courses available to the workforce, talent development leaders must also help guide their employees by focusing on the core skills shared across these career paths. Regardless of the particular position or path, designers of all experience levels can benefit from learning the following:

Design Thinking: Being customer-centric is essential in all aspects of business and graphic design is no different. Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems with research, customer journey maps, prototypes, and more.
Developing Visual Campaigns: Visual content is attention-grabbing and gives you a chance to engage an audience. But one video or infographic isn’t enough—graphic designers must be prepared to plan strategic campaigns. Being able to take on the role of art director and graphic designer will give your team a competitive edge.
Branding: No matter the career path, branding plays an essential role. It’s not just logos and web designs. It’s a complete system for communicating a company’s message. Graphic designers that can master branding will be able to deliver exceptional value for a business by elevating and clearly communicating the company’s brand values.
Color Fundamentals: Everyone in a visually creative field needs to have a solid understanding of color and how to use it strategically. This is especially true for graphic designers.
Universal Principles: There are numerous unspoken/unwritten rules in the design world. Rather than letting graphic designers stumble upon them, L&D leaders can provide access to online courses that highlight the universal principles that have made some of the greatest designs of our time.
Data Intelligence: The science of graphic design isn’t just about creativity and software. It’s also about deriving valuable insights from data that will result in more effective designs. All graphic designers should have a basic understanding of how to use and visualize data when solving creative problems.

These skills and connected lessons are important for all graphic design career paths. However, they only scratch the surface of the deep library of online graphic design courses.

Talent development leaders who want to successfully help the workforce learn graphic design need to do more than just provide access to courses, they must also provide a focused and guided program so their teams will get the most out of their on-demand learning.

Learning Paths for Graphic Design Training

If you’re ready to give your workforce the resources necessary to learn graphic design, we have learning paths that can help provide the focus and direction that will enable them to reach their goals. These curated collections offer strategic groups of courses that guide employees in their training.

A few of our graphic design learning paths include:

Become a Graphic Designer:

With over 24 hours of content, this learning path provides a comprehensive overview of the skills and techniques necessary to get started with graphic design. It’s great for employees looking to supplement their abilities by learning graphic design.

Improve Your Creativity Skills:

Creativity is something everyone in your organization can and should learn. The real problem is breaking through creative blocks to uncover great ideas. This learning path is all about helping graphic designers and non-designers alike, generate creative ideas in greater quantity and quality.

Stay Competitive Using Design Thinking:

Design thinking is a core skill, but it’s also a large topic that contains many smaller concepts and techniques. This learning path builds the core skill by exploring the basic tenets of design thinking and how to put them to work.

These learning paths will provide employees with a solid introduction to graphic design. But they only make up a small section of the overall LinkedIn Learning library. Browse the full catalog to learn more about how you can build a graphic design training program.

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