10 of the Best Design Courses for Beginners

Today, learning to code is easier than ever, thanks to all the courses you can find online. The problem is, there are so many learning platforms out there, finding good courses can be a little overwhelming! But, don’t worry, we’ve here to help.

One particularly helpful provider is Skillshare — a online learning platform where you can learn to code from high quality instructors, but still on a budget. It’s a community-based learning platform for creatives. With over 1.7 million students and over 7,000 courses, this platform has quickly grown up to be one of the best places to learn new skills in a short time.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or an expert looking to learn new skills, we’ve collected 15 amazing web design courses on Skillshare that you can learn to take your design skills to the next level.

Plus, for a limited time, you can get three months of access to Skillshare Premium for just $0.99

The Ultimate Designer Toolkit: 2 Million+ Assets

Envato gives you unlimited access to 19+ million pro design resources, themes, templates, photos, graphics and more. Everything you'll ever need in your design resource toolkit.

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Fundamentals of Design: How to Think Like a Designer

Before you learn to code or start designing website, it’s important that you understand what a “design” really is and how to craft websites that not just work well but also look amazing.

In this course, Jack Zerby, the Founder and Designer of Flavors.me and Goodsie, will take you through the process of understanding how design works and how you can implement great design techniques in your websites.

He’ll also teach you about the power of grids, establishing visual hierarchy, choosing and combining typefaces, and personality and context in color, in 20 short video lessons.

An Online Skillshare Class by Jack Zerby

Hand-Coding Your First Website: HTML and CSS Basics

Learn by doing is the main goal of this course. Instead of boring you with a bunch of videos that explains HTML and CSS basics, this course will let you learn while building your own website.

HTML and CSS are two of the main programming languages that you must learn to design websites. In this course, freelance product designer Rich Armstrong will teach you all about using HTML and CSS to design your first website while allowing you to “do things your own way.”

An Online Skillshare Class by Rich Armstrong

Build A Responsive Webpage With Bootstrap 3

Bootstrap is a popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework that you can use to easily design stylish and mobile-first websites with less coding. Once you learn enough about HTML and CSS, you can get started with this course to learn about Bootstrap.

The course will teach you how to use Bootstrap’s responsive and flexible grids to build complex layouts, create responsive web pages that look great across different devices, and much more.

Freelance Web Designer and Developer, Sandy Ludosky, is an expert in front-end design. She’ll teach you all the basics of using Bootstrap while building your own web page using the framework.

An Online Skillshare Class by Sandy Ludosky

Web Design: Creating A Web Design Style Guide

This short, yet essential, 30-minute course will teach you about developing a style guide.

A style guide is the collections of elements that helps you develop websites while keeping visual consistency across the entire website. In this course, you’ll learn about the elements you need to craft a great style guide, including type, space, color, icons, imagery, forms, buttons, and more.

An Online Skillshare Class by Jake Fleming

Smart Responsive UX Design Patterns: Clever Tips, Tricks and Techniques

User Experience Design (UXD) is the force that holds all the elements of a website design together to offer a great experience to the end-users. You will never be able to design effective websites without learning UXD.

This course, led by Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, is the perfect place to start learning about UXD. The course will teach you about 7 different components of successful user experiences and how to mesh them together to craft amazing web experiences.

An Online Skillshare Class by Vitaly Friedman

Color on the Web I: Design Cohesive Palettes

Did you know that color has a strong effect on evoking emotions and persuasion in humans?

Before you randomly choose colors for your next website design, take this course to understand the effects of color and how to create two effective color palettes for your future designs.

An Online Skillshare Class by Geri Coady

Mastering WordPress: Build The Ultimate Professional Website

Everyone knows how popular WordPress really is. Around 19% of all websites on the web are powered by this CMS (Content Management System).

Take this course to learn about this massively popular platform and how to use it to build professional-looking websites without any coding experience.

An Online Skillshare Class by Malik Motan

The Complete SEO Course – Rank Your Website On Page #1 of Google

Learning how to optimize your websites to rank well on search engines is a skill you must master to build professional websites.

Take this course to learn the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and learn how to get your websites ranked on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more. The course is also best for users of WordPress platform.

An Online Skillshare Class by Ben Hill

Basics of Photoshop: Fundamentals for Beginners

When designing websites, you’ll be dealing with a lot of images and you’ll be doing a lot of image resizing, optimizing images for the web, cropping, and much more. And that’s where Photoshop comes to the rescue.

This course will help you understand the basics of Photoshop, like how to work with its tools, layers, and how to make the most of this incredible photo editing software.

An Online Skillshare Class by Meg Lewis

Fundamentals of Adobe Illustrator for Web Design: Getting Started with the Basics

Creating mockups of a website design is an important part of the website development process. It’s how you’ll be able to visualize a design before start coding the website and even get client’s approval for a design in the negotiation process.

In this informative course, you’ll not only learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator, but you’ll also learn to design a mockup of your own one-page website using the vector graphics editor.

An Online Skillshare Class by Ryan Clark

Get Started Today

What makes Skillshare so great is its high-quality standards that require instructors to offer only the best courses. It has an incredibly diverse range of courses as well, from basic CSS and HTML, to UX, to SEO, making it the perfect platform for you to start learning to code.

Unlike other online learning platforms, you don’t have to buy these courses one by one and spend a fortune to learn web design. With Skillshare, all you have to do is sign up with a $8 per month Premium plan and you’ll get access to all these courses and thousands more at once.

Better yet, we have a special offer for Design Shack readers. For a limited time, you can get three months of access to Skillshare Premium for just $0.99! It’s an absolute bargain, so be sure to head over to the site and take advantage of the offer. You’ll be amazed what you can learn in your first three months!