14 Extremely Helpful Free Graphic Design Courses
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In our visual world, graphic design is an increasingly important skill for all kinds of creatives to have. For photographers and creatives in the fashion world, knowing the basics of Photoshop and the principles of graphic design is crucial for giving your work that professional edge. For illustrators and artists, graphic design is a fundamental part of the job—all the more reason to keep expanding your design skills and knowledge.
Improving your graphic design skill set doesn’t have to mean going back to school, though. There are lots of online graphic design courses that can help you hone your design talents, offered by universities, graphic design experts, and online course hubs like Udemy.
We’ve searched for the best free graphic design courses out there to help you budding designers and other interested creatives brush up on the foundations of typography, color, essential graphic design software, and lots more.
Alison calls itself a “new world of free certified learning.” It says its goal is to make it possible for anyone to study anything, from anywhere, at any subject level, for free. However, it is a for-profit company, so the site does offer premium subscription plans that unlock additional features.
The site is full of different types of courses that often lead to earning a test-based certificate. This can add a new qualification to your resume. Having a certificate in a subject can actually go a long way to secure a job or freelance opportunity. But while it’s free to take any of the courses on Alison, there is a charge if you want a certificate. The pricing starts at about $20 for a digital certificate and ranges up to over $100 for a framed diploma.
Alison has a large number of free graphic design courses available. That means there are options to suit designers of every skill level. For instance, there are graphic design courses that focus on defining all the basic terms and principles, such as this certificate course in Visual and Graphic Skills. There are also courses that teach you how to apply those principles by providing case studies and practice exercises, such as this one on Design Principles.
There is also a range of more specific classes to help you learn to use the tools and software needed for graphic design, such as this class on Photoshop Essential Tools.
All of the courses on Alison are basically presented in slideshows. So instead of having to scroll through a long page of information, everything is broken up into easily-digestible chunks. However, the downside is that every time you move on to a new topic in a lesson, the page reloads and you have to watch an ad for 8 seconds (unless you’re willing to pay the $9 a month for a premium plan).
While it’s not perfect, Alison does offer a great free resource for those seeking to learn graphic design.
Udemy features videos by independent teaching contractors with prices depending on the length of the video, the teacher, and the field. Essentially, Udemy is a competitive classroom marketplace. This means classes are rated, and the quality of the class is illuminated by ratings just like on Yelp. There are frequently sale specials on the site, so watch out for deals on the classes you want. Many of the courses on Udemy are free, too.
The Introduction to Graphic Design is a great place to start. This free graphic design course covers topics including the design process, basic elements, the five main principles of design, and how to see design through new eyes. It aims to teach participants what real designers do, and give them an understanding of what makes good design. The course description says that students don’t need to have any specific software or any prior knowledge of design.
And when you’re done with the introduction, there is a wide variety of other online graphic design courses available for free on Udemy. The site makes it easy to browse through them as you can set the search filter to show only free courses. Just some of the topics they cover software guides, tips for common projects, and in-depth tutorials.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers online OpenCourseWare. OpenCourseWare is the most egalitarian form of education. It exists online as a free database of courses created by professional academic teachers and course writers. Most of these graphic design classes are related to an overarching course on another topic, such as web coding. But they are still helpful and trusted resources. Also, as opposed to discussing just the theory of design, these courses tend to focus more on practical application.
For example, this graphic design class is part of a course on user interface design. It provides a few simple activities that will help you learn graphic design techniques and concepts. That includes visiting a few example websites to study how they handle graphic design and how they could improve.
Also available is a variety of other resources such as lectures on design topics. One example is this presentation on intelligent web design.
The site is well-organized so its easy to navigate and find the lessons you are looking for. In addition, since MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a not-for-profit initiative, you never have to deal with any ads or sales pitches for subscription plans.
Typography is key to the work of a graphic designer. In almost all instances of graphic design, you will see some use of type. Each font adds a different feeling and style to a design. So choosing a font can make or break your design project.
In this document, you can find a comprehensive yet simple introduction to the history and nuances of typography. It’s only about five pages long, but it has a ton of information. So while this is not a graphic design course by any stretch, it deserves a place on this list because it could be invaluable to any design student.
It includes a list of the 100 best typefaces, short descriptions and histories of the 10 most popular typefaces, a list of suggested reading, and explanations on typeface classifications and characteristics. It’s a great introduction for any aspiring graphic designer, and has enough helpful information that it could be a useful resource to revisit again and again.
This article outlines all the resources you need to create a self-taught graphic design course to replace a traditional education. It’s written by Sean Hodge, who’s currently the Business Editor for the Tuts+ educational network. He also has experience building a number of high traffic blogs.
The article is broken down into helpful subtopics such as design principles, history of design, and how to put together a design portfolio. Each section provides a list of helpful resources including design books, educational blogs, job boards for finding design jobs, and websites where you can promote your work.
It’s an incredibly comprehensive list of information that could be the primary basis for how you learn graphic design. At the very least, it is a helpful supplemental resource.
Veerle Pieters is a Belgium-based graphic/web designer with a website dedicated to all things graphic design. She has experience designing everything from logos, stationery, and brochures, to websites and intranet user interfaces.
Her site includes a wide selection of articles with tutorials, tips, and tricks to help you learn graphic design. She includes helpful insight on working with clients and developing a portfolio, as well as simple solutions to problems many graphic designers might face. Most importantly for the new designer, Veerle offers tutorials and tips for using design software.
This blog is delightfully well-designed, and is worth a visit if only for some inspiration.
Canva Design School offers lessons, tutorials, resources, and articles on a variety of topics that will be helpful to new graphic designers. For example, one of their graphic design courses titled “Creativity” is made up of seven lessons that cover subjects including “how to grab attention with your designs” and “how to create and maintain your own vision and style.”
Another helpful graphic design class available is called How to Build a Brand. It covers subjects including how to build a logo, choose a color palette, choose a type palette, find imagery, and create graphics that suit your brand.
Each lesson in these courses is laid out like a long-form article and they and packed with helpful information, example designs, and links to resources. Besides the online graphic design courses, there are many more articles under the site’s blog section. These articles are an ideal place to find some quick tips or inspiration for your next design project.
Envato has created a dense and helpful tutorial archive to help with almost any software and process in design. There is the whole gamut of topics, including Illustrator, Photoshop, Cinema 4D, Rhino, and many more.
In addition, there are free graphic design courses to help you with the business side of the job, such as how to make a professional invoice and how to make a professional resume.
There are over 1,000 courses and how-to tutorials in Envato’s design and illustration database. And browsing through them all is a breeze since the database lets you choose categories such as the specific software or design process. Another helpful feature is that you can filter the results by skill level.
So if you are stuck with a problem you don’t know how to solve, then try this site, you’ll probably find a solution.
Creative Pro is an online design magazine that has a great “How-To” section for helping to learn graphic design. Most of the videos and articles are for experienced designer problems. These articles focus on common challenges that designers face and they provide pro tips on how to overcome them. One example is their article on how to move vector graphics between Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.
One issue with the site is the How-To articles aren’t organized with categories, so it’s not very convenient for browsing. But the list is searchable, so if you have a topic in mind, it’s not too hard to find what you’re looking for.
Overall, this is a great resource for anyone who’s seeking to learn graphic design for free. Beginners could pair these more specific how-to articles with some of the other resources listed here for a well rounded auto-didactic education in graphic design.
CreativeLive offers a range of online courses geared towards designers and artists. The full courses typically aren’t free. However, there is a wide range of free video lessons available that can help you learn graphic design.
For example, there are free graphic design courses on topics including Colors and Their Relationships and What Makes a Successful Book Cover.
However, only the video lessons are free. You don’t get access to course materials like readings and practice assignments unless you pay for them.
Another issue with the site is that when you’re browsing through the large database of lessons, there’s no easy way to tell which lessons are free until you click on one. But once you visit the page for a lesson, it will show you all the lessons from the same course that are free.
If you want to sign up for a full course, they typically cost around $30 to $50 each. Alternatively, you can sign up for a subscription for $25 a month that gets you access to as many courses as you want.
Despite these gripes, the sheer amount of helpful graphic design classes available on CreativeLive make it well worth a visit.
This introduction to design is offered through the California Insititute of Arts on Coursera. Coursera offers online courses from a wide range of universities and companies. The California Institute of Arts has five different free graphic design courses available on the site, under its graphic design specialization section.
The Fundamentals of Creative Design is a great starting point as it covers the basics of topics from typography and image-making, to shape, color, and composition. But all of the courses in CalArt’s graphic design specialization are worth checking out, as they delve into each of those topics in more detail.
One thing that sets these graphic design classes apart from many of the other options out there is that they are much more than just slide shows. Instead, they include a combination of video lessons, readings, and practice exercises.
To have your work marked by an instructor and to receive a certificate when you complete the course, you have to pay to enroll. Typically, to enroll in a specialization and get access to all of its related courses costs between $39-$79 per month.
However, you can get access to all of the course content for free. All you have to do is choose the “audit the course” option when you sign up (avoid the “free trial” offer as it just means you start paying after seven days).
The high quality of these courses and the ability to access all of the content for free makes them an ideal way to learn graphic design.
This online graphic design course from the University of Colorado is another one that’s offered through Coursera. That means you can get access to all the videos, readings, and exercises for free.
This course is a great choice for inexperienced graphic designers. That’s because it is part of a four-course program on effective communication. That means it is aimed at a more general audience and doesn’t require any previous knowledge of graphic design.
It offers easy-to-understand lessons that teach students some design “tricks” that will make it easier to get started on design projects with confidence. It also includes practice exercises where students are presented with example designs, and then have to use what they’ve learned to identify the designs’ strengths and weaknesses.
So while it is perfect for those who are just starting out and are unsure about how to learn graphic design, it also has no shortage of valuable information. If you take the time to go through this free graphic design course, you’ll be off to a great start!
This online graphic design course is offered by the Maryland Institute College of Art. It is available through Kadenze, which is an online learning platform that is very similar to Coursera. They have courses from universities and institutions around the world, and you can get access to all of the course content for free.
This course on graphic design history provides background knowledge that will be useful to any graphic designer. The course description says that to know where graphic design trends are going, you have to understand where they began, what shaped them, and how avant-garde artists reinvented them along the way.
The topics covered include the origins of text and graphic design, liberated styles of the late 1800s, mechanical abstractions and photomontage, practicality in typography, international styles, and more.
The course is packed full of content. It is made up of seven sessions that each involve multiple video lessons and coursework such as quizzes and practice assignments. Another cool thing about this course is that it gives you access to the class discussion forum even as a free user.
So if you are looking for a free graphic design course that you can really sink your teeth into, this is a perfect choice.
This online course was created by the Cornish College of the Arts and is offered through Kadenze. It focuses on the integration of design principles and drawing skills. It’s recommended that participants should already have some understanding of fundamental design theory before taking this course, so it is a good choice once you’ve taken some of the other courses listed here.
The course syllabus covers some topics in design theory such as the principles that make illustration effective for communication. It also covers more hands-on topics including digital tool demos to show some advanced techniques for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.
Similar to the course listed above, each session in this course is made up of multiple video lessons. They also include assignments that will give you a chance to apply the knowledge you’ve picked up. It is a great option for designers who are looking to expand their illustration skills.
So now you know some of the options that are out there when it comes to learning graphic design for free. These online graphic design courses will let you expand your abilities and career prospects, all from the comfort of your home and working at your own pace. The wide range of classes available means you should have no problems finding something that matches your skill level and needs. So start brushing up on your graphic design skills today!
If you are looking for even more Photoshop resources, we curated a list of 61 of the best Photoshop tutorials that you should check out!
This article was updated January 5, 2020.
Ten Tips to improve your Industrial Design Portfolio

For an Industrial Designer, there are few things more significant than your portfolio. It’s the number one reason you still haven’t landed your first design job. Alternatively, it’s the main reason you got the job you are in. We all understand its importance, so here are a few pointers.By no means have I figured it all out or published a blueprint for the ultimate portfolio. However, I’ve learned a lot along the way and received some great advice from top guys at places like IDEO, Nike, Fuseproject and Google – and I feel there are some really great points to pass on. So, here are 10 thoughts to consider:

Your portfolio should not look like a catalog of the products you’ve designed. You’re not trying to sell your products, you’re trying to sell YOU. In order to do this, you need to show your thought process and how you got to the end solution. If you only show images of the final product, then that is the only thing you can be judged on. With no evidence of initial ideas and how you approached different aspects of the project, you make it impossible for a reader to assess the thinking behind your approach. If I’m reviewing your work, I may dislike a certain aspect of the final design, but might appreciate the way you got there. If you don’t show the development journey then you don’t allow for this appreciation.

In order to sell YOU, think about what capabilities you can convey. One great exercise is to note down a list of the skills you have, and make sure these skills are evidenced in your portfolio.
Rendering is only one skill. A lot of portfolios fail to show a range of skills beyond KeyShot, so think about incorporating hand sketches, Photoshop renderings, Illustrator linework, and prototypes.

In recent years, I’ve seen graduates compile a page of random drawings and group them on a page titled ‘Sketching’. This presentation style of miscellaneous snippets is NOT the way to go. The work should not be grouped by skill. There’s no story in that. More importantly, there’s no storytelling ABILITY being conveyed.
Instead, your portfolio should be presented through projects, and the skills are entwined within those projects. Not every project needs to communicate EVERY skill. One project might focus more on a mechanical challenge and another may focus on form, but the skills are integrated into projects – not isolated in a separate section.

When you build your level of design experience, you have more projects in your locker than you need for an application. So, you base your decision of which projects to include based on which are the most relevant to that specific business.
When you are just graduating, you can still adopt the same mindset even though you have a limited number of projects. The way you can do this is by shifting the focus of the project. You are in control of your portfolio and have the ability to draw attention to whatever you like. For a large, complex project you will not go through every aspect of the design in an application portfolio. So, if you know that the particular role you are applying for requires more of an understanding of mechanics, then draw more attention to that aspect of the project. Tailor your portfolio for each application.

I often get asked by ID students if they should include graphic design work within their portfolio. The answer is always no. The reason is because your portfolio itself should be a shining example of your sensitivity to graphic design, layout, and proportion. The question normally comes from those who enjoy developing brand identities on the side or have a graphics freelance gig designing menus for local restaurants. There is a tendency to include things just because you CAN do them. Just because you can, it doesn’t make them any more relevant.
Photography skills are important as a designer, but not as important as being a great designer. That is what must come first and foremost. Make sure that you don’t infringe on your ability to present yourself as a great designer by clouding the portfolio with a lot of ‘side skills’. I’ve seen 22-pagedesign portfolios where the last 8 slides were personal photography. This is detrimental. Instead, plant a seed in your résumé by mentioning other skills and present more detail in the interview (if you land it). First and foremost, focus on communicating the fact you can design great products.

The purpose of the initial application portfolio is not to land the job. It’s to land the interview. When you adopt this mindset, your application portfolio will improve. It only needs to create enough intrigue for the Design Manager or Senior Designer to say “Ok, let’s bring her in for an interview”. The speed at which the reader will flick through your work is rapid. Barely enough time to read sub-headings, let alone a huge paragraph. Engineering roles are different, but for Industrial Design positions, I skim it incredibly fast and stop when something jumps out and makes a visual impact. Only then will I read a few of the details. There are two main levels being assessed. One is the quality of the visual communication. The second is the quality of the actual ideas and concepts. (Behind a great idea drawn badly, is still an individual with great ideas). Both are being judged.
However, the point to take away here is that it MUST be visually impactful in order to catch attention in the first place and draw the reader in. You don’t need to describe every task and every detail in long paragraphs. You can tell the full story in the interview. Telling the story through text is too easy. It’s lazy. A key differentiator is in being able to capture the important aspects of a story in a visual and creative way. So, reduce your word count and make a visual impact.

One thing that contributes to a poor experience from the reader’s perspective is when you are 4 pages into a project and have seen various sketches, images and renderings, yet you STILL don’t fully understand what the project is about. You’re still asking yourself what the whole point is and what problem is being addressed.
This happens when you don’t clarify the premise at the beginning and make it completely understandable. By not filling this gap in the reader’s understanding, you skip on before they are on the same wavelength. It’s what Chip & Dan Heath refer to in their book Made To Stick as ‘The Curse Of Knowledge’. As in, because you know the subject area so well and are very close to it, you struggle to break it down effectively for someone seeing it for the first time. Taking a step back and being able to do this is a very important skill for any designer.
You must take the reader on a journey where they understand each step. When you do this well, and clarify the problem, it means the reader fully understands what needs to be addressed, and can therefore have a heightened appreciation for the actual ideas within the ideation pages. They get a greater sense of what you are trying to achieve and start connecting with your work on a level deeper than just seeing nice visuals. Allowing for this deeper connection through more effective storytelling is the difference between a good portfolio and a great portfolio.

I often come across individuals who are trying to land their first job in a design team, presenting themselves as ‘JHS Designs’. It’s not appropriate. You are John Smith, trying to land a job, so put your name on the cover and not some corporate nonsense. The other thing I see is initials turned into a logo that’s barely readable, and garish borders on every page. Stick with your full name in a simple typeface and get rid of the border. Do away with the clutter, go full width and let the work speak for itself. Keep it simple (stupid).

What I mean by ‘commoditised’ work is the type of content that doesn’t really show how good you are as a designer. I’m talking about the types of pages that anyone could put together, that don’t show the skills that help separate applicants.
For example, statistics from market research sat next to generic images you found online, followed by a page of existing competitor products and their features, followed by a page explaining target users. Although these are things that may be carried out during the project, they are the types of things that should be done as concisely as possible (if at all) in an application portfolio. It comes back to the point about not needing to tell the ENTIRE story in the initial application because you can go into the detail in the interview. Graduates show too much of this sort of work.
Naturally, we are drawn to pages that are rich in ‘hard skills’. Sketches, ideation pages, visuals of refined concepts and exploded view renderings. These types of things are more individual and help give a better steer as to whether you would bring them in for an interview because they are ‘easier’ to separate if they’ve been done poorly or to a high standard.
Although research stats and personas help with the understanding of the details of the project, they have less influence on the decision to bring in for an interview. Therefore, your portfolio wants to have a high concentration of ‘skill-rich’ pages. People often don’t do this because they lack confidence, so put in the hours and make those pages great. There’s no other way around it.

Although your portfolio should not look like a catalogue of renders and photographs of the final product, your presentation of the final product is still a VERY important element. The advice I’ve received time and again from some big-hitters in the industry is that less is without doubt more.
Many portfolios show multiple photographs of the final product on one page in a grid layout. This is the fastest way to lose all visual impact. Less on the page is the way forward. It requires a lot more skill to select ONE image. The right image. The one that simultaneously shows the product in context, communicates its purpose and is visually striking. A picture paints a thousand words, but only if it’s a great picture.
When thinking about your hero shot, don’t look at what other students are doing. If you are designing a wireless speaker for the home, go and see how Bang & Olufsen are presenting their latest product in GQ magazine. Look at the billboard campaigns for the latest Tom Ford sunglasses or social media ads for the latest Dyson fan. Look to the best in the world for inspiration, not the best in your class. You will instantly up your game.
Also, creating an image of the product being used in context usually requires more skill to make it look great, compared to rendering out of context against a white background. Sometimes these clean renders in white space are appropriate, but if you know the ideal image is to show the product underwater on someone’s wrist, then push yourself to visualize this. You’ll develop this ability faster and contribute to your own growth, instead of building a moat around your skill set.
So, that concludes ten things to consider when putting your portfolio together. We wish you the best of luck in crafting the best version you can, and moving closer to the job you want most. Go ahead and bookmark this page for future use, or share it with a friend who’s gearing up for that job interview!

Nick Chubb is a Senior Industrial Designer at IDC in London, designing consumer products and medical devices for some of the world’s leading brands. He has a 1st Class Masters Degree in Product Design and assesses hundreds of design portfolios each year. He acts as lead portfolio advisor at Arts Thread, and is often invited to give talks at leading Universities on the subject of design. Learn more at nickchubbdesign.com

If you wish to take your design portfolio to the next level and land more interviews at the companies you love most, check out Nick’s One-to-One Portfolio Improvement Program. Learn more at nickchubbdesign.com/portfolio-improvement-program
2017 predictions for web design & technology trends
When I worked as a web designer, I was fascinated by how design trends changed each year. Since hanging up my design boots and focusing on being CEO of Envato, my focus has shifted from visual trends, to industry and technology ones. As I did in 2014 and 2015, here’s my take on where the world is moving!
Project Felix from Adobe
3D is inexorably headed our way, and it’s coming in many forms.
First, we’re about to see a pretty decent set of 3D/2D compositing tools come out of Adobe in the form of Project Felix (alpha). Do designers want 3D? For graphic design work, I think the answer is very much yes. We recently partnered with the 3D giant Turbosquid to offer rotatable layered 3D renders in our Envato Elements subscription and have seen thousands of downloads in the following days.
For browser-based web design, we’ve got WebGL for serious applications, and CSS 3D Transformations for neat tricks. These aren’t new, but their usage is still pretty novel. Here’s a nice write-up with some eye opening inspiration from last year.
And finally, there is of course VR/AR interfaces on their way. With WebVR (visit Mozilla’s portal), A-Frame, and the freshly pre-released ReactVR, the tooling for creating UI for this new medium is evolving steadily. But don’t be fooled, just because these tools make use of familiar technologies, doesn’t mean working in this new space will be a simple cross-over. FastCo has a great write-up on just how far the mental jump is.
It’s never been a better time to start scrubbing up your 3D skills. Whether it’s just for making sweet looking graphics, experimenting with browser-based interfaces, or going in the deep end to invent the future of interaction.
Lingo, from the people behind the Noun Project
We’re in a golden era of tools for designers with new products coming out every month. Just hang out on ProductHunt for a while!
Innovative tools are popping up in every part of the workflow. From brand/asset management (Lingo and Bynder), to prototyping and collaboration (Marvel, Zeplin, InVision, Flinto, Justinmind), to website creation (Webydo, Blocs, Webflow), to tools for the amateur or marketer (Canva, Stencil, PicMonkey), and of course, to professional creation tools (Sketch, Affinity). And those are just the larger, more successful ones.
Where there is proliferation, inevitably comes market consolidation. The bigger tools are showing that they will acquire (Marvel buys POP, InVision buys SilverFlows) or imitate their rivals, in the race to win the space. The next couple of years should see more of the same.
What’s driving all this innovation? Much of it boils down to a paradigm shift created by the internet. The ability to collaborate and share online, the SaaS model for software in the cloud and browser, and the associated rise in importance of user experience and prototyping that mobile and web have necessitated.
Since those trends haven’t run their course yet, we should expect more innovative apps to follow in 2017. I continue to watch with interest to see how Adobe respond to these trends. So far we’ve seen one major push in the form of Adobe Experience Design, and it’s getting some solid reviews when paired up against Sketch. Surprisingly though, we haven’t seen a lot of acquisitions from the big U.S. firm. This isn’t because Adobe isn’t acquisitive (recent years saw them buy stock photo site Fotolia to create Adobe Stock and social network Behance to name a couple), so perhaps they are simply biding their time to pick a winner. Still no matter what Adobe does, it’s clear there’s plenty of appetite to go outside of the Creative Cloud for tooling.
WordPress’ REST API based Calypso interface
Still the incumbent web platform, WordPress is increasingly under fire from the website builders — Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. With multimillion dollar ad budgets putting them into the Super Bowl, this trio are hell bent on taking on the mantle of most-popular-website-tool from WordPress, and they’re making inroads amongst the DIY / small business market.
WordPress for its part is responding. Matt Mullenweg has called a war council on marketing, and increasingly podcasts and media feature spots not for Squarespace et al, but for WordPress.
Mind you, it’s not advertising that’s driving the growth in these newer web builders, but simplicity and ease of use. So a more important effort from WordPress is the continued push on their REST API. Why is the API so critical? It enables WordPress’ rich ecosystem of developers and designers to repurpose the core of WordPress however they think most appropriate. Automattic themselves put out an interface called Calypso, in part, to demonstrate the power of the API.
To protect it’s spot, WordPress needs to find a way to fuse simpler interfaces like Calypso on to the complexity of its platform of plugins and themes. To make the complex simple is no mean feat. Especially when that complexity is the foundation of such a big ecosystem.
Still, there are a lot of bright minds bent on making sure WordPress has the cake, and eats it too.
Adobe’s Sensei is a framework of intelligent services
A couple of years ago I predicted we’d see more “AI” type tools appearing in the world of design. One of the first, a website builder called TheGrid, has been something of a disappointment after a much-hyped and marketed launch. But that doesn’t mean the design world isn’t seeing steps forward.
TheGrid’s fanfare paved the way for competitors like Wix to introduce their own take on the concept of AI-powered web design. Meanwhile in the logo space Tailor Brands has now raised millions, and seen newer entrants like Logojoy hit the market to compete with it.
Of course this isn’t the full-blown human-like ‘AI’ you might see in a movie like Ex Machina, rather it’s mostly ‘Machine Learning’. This is the process of using computers to optimize and ‘learn’ from user behaviour and data.
To a professional designer, all of these products are a bit clunky and produce some pretty naff results. But it’s not a good idea to bet against technology. These things will get stronger over time (that’s pretty much how they’re designed to work).
What does that mean for designers? It’s not that different from any other technological advancement in our field. We simply move upstream to broader, deeper solutions that solve design problems more holistically, while simultaneously making use of these same tools to help us do just that.
In fact, Adobe is working hard on their AI/Machine Learning framework, Sensei — some secret sauce they plan to feed into all their applications. Where might you see Sensei at work? Think Photoshop’s Face-aware liquify tool, and in-app “search by image”. It’s early days for Sensei, but Adobe is no slouch on the technical advancements, and we can expect its offerings in the Creative Cloud (as well as Marketing and Document Clouds) to get more powerful as Sensei learns from the huge troves of information Adobe feeds it.
Clearbanc — targeted financial services
How people work has been changing for years, but the push towards the “sharing economy” has broadened the market for contract/freelance workers by leaps and bounds. While there is plenty about this trend that isn’t good news (think worker rights, stability and protections), there is some upside. Namely, the market for providing services for freelancers is improving with the increased demand.
In the U.S., the Freelancer’s Union has long been an advocate and service provider for the freelancer community. The union offers access to information, networks, advocacy and a range of insurance services. This isn’t always an easy business to be in however. Just ask Zen99, who formed to help freelancers in the US deal with their taxes (and the 1099 forms they file) as well as insurance. Despite making it into the prestigious Y Combinator, Zen99 closed down in late 2015 (here’s their fascinating post-mortem).
The traditional domain of businesses catering to the freelance market was in invoicing and accounting (Xero, Freshbooks, LessAccounting and their ilk). But more recently we’re seeing other types of services. Take Clearbanc for instance, special purpose financial services catering exclusively to freelancers.
Services around the freelance space are blooming on many fronts. Check out Bonsai to help manage teams of freelancers, or Konsus, a service to streamline the process of finding a freelancer. And 2017 should see even more services and tools for the freelancing ecosystem. It’s a good time to be going solo!
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