Online Art, Design, Illustration, and Digital Media Courses

Do you know how to get the best out of your digital images? As every art director knows, even the best photographs (on the best of days) can be plagued by problems such as color casts, unnatural tones, dull highlights, murky shadows, or low contrast. In this online color correction course, you'll learn systematic techniques for every aspect of Photoshop color management using Photoshop. Working with a Photoshop guru, you'll learn how to identify classic color scenarios and use both comprehensive and quick-and-dirty methods for correcting them.

Typography, technology, and culture are intertwined. Type has the power to communicate meaning and mood through its quirks and beauty, its history and diversity. In this advanced online typography course, you'll learn advanced concepts in typography, building your portfolio through hands-on projects. You'll experiment with type fusion, learn the details of text layout and information hierarchy, create a visual identity for product package and a civic authority, and even design your own currency.

Adobe After Effects is a powerful application for motion graphics and visual effects for film and video. After Effects is used for broadcast graphics, music videos, feature films, video rotoscoping, corporate presentations, and conferences. In this online After Effects course, you can study with a leading animator and learn how to use After Effects to create sophisticated motion graphics—using text and object animations, compositing videos and images, and adding audio and effects. You'll learn how to set keyframes on a timeline and work with transform properties, motion paths, masks, effects, and more.

Bootstrap provides a framework of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to speed up your site development. Designing with Bootstrap puts a wealth of useful code at your fingertips. In this course, you'll learn how to build responsive, mobile-first web sites using Bootstrap 5 and Dreamweaver, Adobe's HTML editor. Working with an expert instructor, you'll learn how to design web sites from using HTML and CSS to structure and design page layouts, and ensuring that your designs work on a range of platforms and devices. Each project includes accessibility testing as an integral part of the workflow.

The powerful assets of Bootstrap are made easier to access using Adobe Dreamweaver. In this advanced course, you'll learn how to build responsive layouts using Bootstrap, add advanced CSS styles and transitions, add JavaScript and jQuery features, all without reams of code. Working with a pro Web designer, you'll learn how to apply these techniques to practical design project scenarios.

Color is an essential tool for any designer. Though each color has its own specific hue and value, the expression and perception of color changes in different contexts. In this online color theory course, you'll learn how to work with color, discovering how to develop color schemes for your design projects. The course will range from fundamental color concepts and terminology to the practical application of color in typography and using color effectively on-screen.

Where do creative concepts come from? In advertising, illustration, and design, you need to be able generate many ideas for your clients and projects. You can have all the skills in the world, but unless you can develop creative concepts, your products and content will get lost in the sea of what's out there. This online creative concept development course provides you a training in identifying the needs of each project, brainstorming solutions, challenging your assumptions, and testing/evaluating your ideas until you have a winner.

What makes any image work, in graphic design or photography? Composition, literally the assembly or construction of elements, is the artful arrangement that guides the viewer's eye and unifies your work. In this online 2D design course, you'll develop your compositional skills by analyzing everything from Grand Masters to Madison Avenue ads to tubes of toothpaste. Through a series of artistic projects, you'll learn the principles of effective composition.

You've spent years building a portfolio brimming with beautiful work. You can have all the talent in the world, but you also need to know how to position yourself for successful career. In this online design business course, you'll learn the essentials of finding work as a creative professional, whether in a design firm, in-house art department, or freelance. You'll gain feedback from a design pro on everything from how to present your portfolio and resume, find work opportunities, and market yourself, to building a professional persona and networking with your peers.

Color is a fundamental medium for any artist or designer. Typography is what sets designers apart from other artists. Composition, literally the assembly or construction of elements, is the artful arrangement that guides the viewer's eye through an image. In this course, you will analyze everything from Grand Masters to Madison Avenue ads to tubes of toothpaste, and discover how color, type, and composition are combined to create effective and powerful visual communications. Class projects challenge you to build and apply your design skills in application to real-life creative scenarios.

Digital illustration is a challenging and expressive area of graphic design. With Adobe Illustrator, you can develop your unique personal style as an artist. In this online advanced digital illustration course, you'll learn professional illustration and Adobe Illustrator techniques for communicating your creative concepts. Working with a pro illustrator and designer, you'll learn approaches for creating editorial illustrations, icons, retro poster designs, 3D illustrations, and restaurant identity designs.

In this course, you'll build a foundation in fundamental photography techniques. You will gain control over your camera's manual settings, learning how to balance the elements in the Exposure Triangle (ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture/F-Stop. You will discover how to set White Balance appropriately, create depth of field, and capture motion. We will explore composition concepts to help you make your photographs more interesting and effective and equip you for the types of adjustments photographers make to adjust to different lighting conditions. To give you experience in some important genres, you will gain practical experience in shooting different kinds of portrait photographs and sports/motion photographs.

Digital video is an exciting field, recently described by FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a megatrend. In this online video editing course, you'll learn the art and craft of editing videos using Adobe Premier, or equivalent NLE program. Working with a pro digital artist, you'll learn time-honored concepts in editing, including shot types, story structure, scripting, editing sound, continuity editing, CODECs, adding text and graphics, compressing and expanding time, and storytelling strategies. Through a series of creative projects, you'll learn how to create polished movies for digital and social media applications.

Can you hear Sundance calling? In this online video production course, you'll learn the basics of planning and shooting videos. You'll learn how to control your video camera, execute different kinds of shots, and maintain continuity in your projects. Working with an expert instructor, you'll gain experience in shooting different kinds of videos, focusing on storytelling, production planning, and sound editing, with the ultimate goal of telling stories that move audiences. This course will empower you with the knowledge to tell compelling stories for news, corporate video, and social media.

Many people are afraid to draw, but the truth is that drawing is not as hard as it seems. If you can relax, get your mind around the task, and begin to understand what you see, you can draw. In this online drawing course, you'll learn how to analyze what you see in the world around you and communicate it on paper. Guided by a professional artist, you will explore the critical concepts of line, mass, form, perspective, value, and composition, building a solid foundation for all your art and design work.

Graphic designers today must be ready to tackle a wide range of projects from identity design to editorial design to product and packaging design. In this online graphic design course, you'll establish a firm foundation for professional design work. Gain insights from industry veterans and explore the challenges of designing posters, logos, magazine covers, book layouts, 3D designs, and brand identities. Hone your design process, as you research each project, develop concepts, work with expert instructor feedback, and begin to develop pieces for your portfolio.

What essentials do artists and designers just need to know? In this online art history course, you'll build a foundation in art and the artists who created it. You'll explore profound themes that have concerned artists for centuries: nature, the human body, society, religion, and politics. Through engaging lectures and projects, you'll learn how to identify the mediums, materials, and techniques artists use and discuss the styles of important artists, art movements, and historical periods from antiquity through the mid-20th century.

In order to build a Web site today, you need to know how to code using HTML and CSS. In this online HTML/CSS course, you'll learn just how fun and creative hand coding and designing Web sites can be. Working with a professional Web designer, you'll discover how to create Web pages with HTML and control page design and layout with CSS and get up to speed with current Web design practices including HTML5, semantic coding, CSS Grid, Flexbox, Web fonts, and CSS3 effects. The course will also provide an introduction to techniques used to test website accessibility.

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful and versatile tool for creating illustrations, logos, and graphics for print and the web. You can learn to produce detailed and scalable art in this online Illustrator course. Working with an expert instructor, you'll build a strong foundation, exploring shape tools, drawing tools, layers, the Pen tool (a lesson unto itself) as well as transformations/distortions, type tools, and modifying paths and shapes. Hands-on illustration projects include creating a robot, a series of album covers, a marketing postcard, an advertisement vehicle wrap, and a company logo.

Adobe Illustrator puts any conceivable vector art objective at your fingertips. But most digital designers only scratch the surface of Illustrator. To make a splash, one must delve deeper. In this advanced online Illustrator course, you'll create photo-realistic illustrations, complex patterns, rich designs, and learn how to accelerate your efforts with helpful workflow features. Working with an expert instructor, build on your existing Illustrator skills and tackle high-end projects with depth, dimension, and wow-power.

Layout designers today need the skills to move seamlessly between print and digital projects. Luckily, Adobe InDesign can handle it all. In this online InDesign course, you’ll explore a host of essential InDesign techniques and focus on developing efficient workflows. The course will impart a working knowledge of InDesign's main capabilities, everything from basic features to using parent pages, importing and manipulating objects, controlling text flow and style, and organizing content with tables, layers, links, and conveyor tools. Projects give you training in a range of real world print/digital publishing projects, from brochures to catalogs, magazines to ePubs, and even an interactive folio for the iPad.

Think drawing is a gift that has to come naturally? Drawing is a skill that can be developed with practice. In this online beginner drawing course, you'll learn how to draw with proper techniques, discovering how to represent what you see through studies in contour drawing, perspective, positive/negative space, and value. With feedback from an expert instructor, you will improve your drawing and develop a deeper understanding of any subject you are trying to capture as an artist or designer.

Today's business clients are looking for designers who can apply their creative talents in ways that enhance strategic business goals. In this online introductory Marketing Design course, you'll learn tried-and-true marketing concepts and explore how they affect the design process. You'll gain a solid grasp of the marketing process, understand key terms and concepts that every marketer uses, and pick up smart questions to ask in client meetings.

How does animation actually work? In this online introductory animation course, you'll learn the 12 essential principles of animation including squash and stretch, anticipation, and exaggeration. Working with a professional animator, you'll explore how fundamental concepts in physics and motion are used to create sophisticated, convincing motion art in sequential art, video, 2D animation, and 3D animation, and more. Practical projects include stop-motion and flipbook-style animation.

What makes a painting work? What inspires a sculptor to create? Artists are influenced by the language of art and visual communication, historical and social forces, and the evolution of new modes of expression. In this online visual arts course, you'll deepen your art knowledge by exploring your own artistic creativity. You'll look at paintings, sculptures, experimental pieces, and more, learning to critique composition and decode their social or political purpose. Course projects include art themes and creating your own art pieces that demonstrate your grasp of course concepts in the medium of your choice.

Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, the programming language that allows you to make things happen when a user interacts with your website. You will learn how to create clean, valid code as you create programs that respond to various kinds of user interaction. Assignments include a range of projects: interactive dialogue boxes, a trivia quiz, a rainbow color picker, a sortable database, and more.

Life drawing is a fundamental artistic challenge. Capturing the human figure in all its infinite, intricate variations requires both a mastery of technique and a thorough understanding of the body. In this online life drawing course, you'll make your figure drawings come to life with guidance with feedback from an expert instructor. Following traditional methods, you'll learn the standard measures and proportions artists use to achieve naturalistic and expressive figure drawings. The course builds progressively from the fundamentals to the challenges of portraiture, three-dimensional form, composition, and expression.

Have you ever spent more time working on a photo shoot at your desk than you did taking the pictures? If so, consider managing, developing, printing, and presenting your images efficiently with Adobe Lightroom Classic. In this online Lightroom course, working with a photography pro, you'll learn how to import and catalog your images with ease, and use basic and advanced development and retouching tools to create stellar shots, taking advantage of advanced production techniques and workflows.

Logos are the front line—the identity of a company. They are ubiquitous, and they are vital. In this introductory online logo design course, you'll learn how to design logos that will strengthen the visual image of your own or your client's company. Working with a design pro, you'll explore the development of logos through a series of case studies. Each exercise combines a written, conceptual component with hands-on projects for creating an effective logo.

Marketing designers have a daunting task: communicate with visuals and text in a way that entices consumers. Large corporations, small businesses, and non-profits alike require effective marketing design to promote their products and services. In this online marketing course, you'll make design decisions through research, writing, and planning techniques that set marketing designers (and their clients) apart from the competition. Each course lecture features real-life case studies as well as industry best practices for concept development, branding extensions, image-building, presentation, and even non-traditional marketing.

For centuries, artists have used paint to represent the physical world. Now you too can learn how to paint online. In this online painting course, you'll learn a traditional approach to oil painting or acrylic painting. Working with a professional artist, you'll study a time-honored approach to painting that enables you to capture proportion, perspective, and lighting in the world around you. You'll learn how to build a foundation with preparatory sketches and underpainting, find out how to mix your paints correctly, and gain control over value through monochromatic painting and color studies.

Adobe Photoshop is the premiere image manipulation tool for print design, Web design, and photography. You can learn to tame this creative powerhouse of a program in this online Photoshop course. Working with a design pro, you’ll learn the best techniques for common Photoshop jobs including selecting and isolating objects, creating image composites, masking and vignetting images, setting typography, and improving images with retouching and effects.

How well do you know Adobe Photoshop, the industry-standard imaging app? In this advanced online Photoshop course you'll transcend your current skill set with vector illustration techniques, photo-realistic painting, high-impact typography, and professional editing methods that preserve the editability of your original images. Working with a Photoshop pro, you'll build proficiency with the Pen tool, Adobe Color, Smart Objects and Filters, and more.

Professional designers make choices informed by the present and the past. In this online design history course, you'll explore design movements from the early 20th century through today and gain experience in research, idea-building, and production of creative concepts. Working with an experienced art director, you'll learn how to use historical knowledge and cultural awareness as a springboard for your contemporary design projects.

Typography is what sets designers apart from other artists. In visual communication, typography must be integrated (every last loop, bowl, and descender) into a total design. In this online basic typography course, you'll explore the anatomy of the letterform. Working with a design pro, you'll learn how to classify typefaces and use them creatively. Understanding the fundamentals of typography will give your work power, eloquence, and beauty.