Conclusion: what now?

Pfew, that was a long course. I don’t think any more can be said about graphic design.

I also understand it might have been technical or theoretical at many points. I’m glad you stuck it through. That’s why I mentioned, at the start, you should view this mostly as a “quickstart” and then as a “reference”.

Because real skill and understanding comes from applying all this to numerous projects. Never from reading a text or looking at images showing design principles.

From this point, you should do two things:

• Start designing and practicing with the tools I gave you
• Look at specializations.

The first one helps these tools become second nature to you. The second will give you advanced, specific design knowledge.

For example, you could look further into logo design, or learn absolutely everything there is to know about typography. Or the colour red, if you want to be that specialized.

If you’re ever stuck, here are some design exercises to do:

• Restricted Library: Set yourself some strong and some subtle restrictions, such as a fixed grid or limited colour palette, and see what you can do with them. Simply take a piece of text or an illustration, and make an awesome design out of it, within the restrictions you set yourself.
• Dailies: Create a simple design every day, for a relatively long period of time. Start with a simple idea, such as “keep a journal” and design the text you write (or things you draw). Then, every subsequent day, change the parameters or restrictions a little, and create another simple design. These should not be time consuming—instead, they will teach you how to design something unique very quickly, even when your inspiration well is dry.
• Persona Portraits: Develop a fictitious persona, however complex you want it to be. A name, appearance, and character traits should do. Then, design something about that character, through the lens of the character. For example, the person could be very scared of squirrels—use your knowledge of line and shape and design principles to show this fear.

As I said at the start, there’s another large part of design: usability or sometimes called user experience. This course has only been about graphical design, which is only one (small) part of designing anything. I recommend reading all the other Visual courses to fill in the other gaps, and check in regularly if a new one was added.

I hope to have been of service to you. Keep designing, Pandaqi.