Online Graphic Design Courses in South Africa

Graphic designing is one of the world’s most well-known and successful fields. It is a crucial aspect of branding and marketing, as it helps businesses communicate their message effectively to their audience. As it plays a fundamental role in our daily lives, one must know enough about this field.

For this purpose, many institutes in South Africa offer graphic design courses to enhance students’ knowledge, helping them learn new design and creative skills for branding and marketing. Online courses are more accessible, convenient, flexible, and available at reduced cost. Therefore, many people prefer online courses over on-campus learning.

The following article is all you need if looking for online graphic design courses in South Africa. Let’s dig into the following guide and explore the details of each course.

1. Graphic Design Specialization

One of the well-known online learning platforms, Coursera, offers this free online specialization course. This exciting course enables individuals to learn and apply graphic design principles to a comprehensive branding project. One of the best parts about this course is that it is a beginner-level course, meaning it does not require any experience.

This four-course sequence exposes students to the fundamental skills necessary to make sophisticated graphic design: process, historical context, and communication through image-making and typography. The curriculum is a five-course series with an average rating of 4.7 stars.

You can complete this course within two months and earn a career certificate. After completing this course, you can work in interface design, motion graphics, and editorial design.

2. Graphic Design

The University of Colorado Boulder offers this beginner-level free online graphic design course at Coursera. This course allows students to apply inspired design ideas to their work. You can learn new skills from industry experts, gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool, develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects, and earn a shareable career certificate.

It has an average rating of 4.8 stars. Furthermore, this practical course gives you the tools to create professional-looking PowerPoints, reports, resumes, and presentations. It has four modules that you can complete within approximately 25 hours.

3. The Language of Design: Form And Meaning

The California Institute Of The Arts offers this free online graphic design course at Coursera. This course is vital in recalling and explaining the key terms essential to form, meaning, and audience and applying them successfully within an appraisal of graphic design. I chose this online course because it is ideal for individuals who seek to develop and refine a critical vocabulary about art and design, like practicing graphic designing skills and much more.

This course has five modules that you can complete within approximately eight hours and earn your career certificate upon its completion. The flexible schedule of the course makes it one of the top-rated online graphic design courses on Coursera, with an average rating of around 4.6.

4. Graphic Design Elements For Non-Designers Specialization

If you are curious about the design process, work on a team with designers, and need to speak some of their language, this course is perfect for you. This course helps you explore essential graphic design elements, color theory, images, publication design, and techniques for creating effective layouts.

Moreover, it helps students learn about typography, the creative process, the importance of brainstorming, and how to discuss and critique design professionally. This free beginner-level course is available at Coursera with an average rating of 4.7. The four-course series has a flexible schedule you can complete in one month.

5. Create Eye-Catching Logos Using Canva For An Ebrand

Are you looking for a free intermediate-level short course on Coursera? Well, your search ends here because this course has everything you need. This course allows you to learn about the project concept, tools, and fundamentals of logo design.

Additionally, after completing this course, you can create a workflow and generate different logos for an Ebrand. This 2-hour project-based course includes intermediate to advanced-level logo designing and branding skills using the accessible version of Canva.

One of the reasons why this course is one of my top favorites is because it is a guide project, meaning all you need to do is learn, practice, and apply job-ready skills with expert guidance.

6. Effective Communication: Writing, Design, And Presentation Specialization

This free course at Coursera helps individuals build communication skills for professional success. Furthermore, it allows them to learn business writing, graphic design, business presentation skills, and more. Simply put, this course plays a fundamental role in enhancing your business and marketing skills.

This four-course series has a flexible schedule you can complete in 2 months. You will receive the career certificate you can attach to your CV upon finishing your course.

7. Fundamentals Of Graphic Design: Build Your Own Logo Design

This free online graphic design course allows you to create a logo for your brand and incorporate colors, texts, and images that reflect your identity and convey your message to your audience uniquely yet impressively. Moreover, it teaches you the significance of color psychology when it comes to logo design.

It is a guided project, meaning you must learn, practice, and apply job-ready skills with expert guidance. You can complete this short project course within approximately two hours.

8. Graphic Design Masterclass – Learn Great Design

Although numerous online learning platforms offer free online courses, many prefer paid online graphic design courses because they provide career certificates and more skills. This paid online course on Udemy covers Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, design theory, branding, and logo design.

It helps you create logos and branding packages for potential clients. Additionally, it enables you to deeply understand typography, color theory, photos, layout, blocking, and other design theories and skills.

After completing this course, you can learn the basics of Affinity Designer and the difference between Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer. This course has 34 sections and around 225 lectures. In addition, it has 54 downloadable resources that play a prominent role in enhancing student’s knowledge.

9. The Complete Graphic Design Theory For Beginners Course

By signing up for this course, you will have intermediate to expert-level knowledge of graphic design theory that you can immediately apply to your career, job, hobby, or company. Moreover, this course allows you to learn color theory and how it applies to the world around us, from products and art to branding and advertising.

This course has 13 sections and 82 lectures with 14 downloadable resources to enhance individuals’ knowledge. One of the reasons why it is one of my top favorite paid courses on Udemy is that it teaches individuals about past and current design trends that you can use as a source for creating your original work.

10. Graphic Design Mastery- AI, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign

Are you looking for a paid online course on Udemy that teaches you graphic design theories? Don’t worry because this course is all you need.

This article tells you how to present your graphic design work in a great way to get your designs approved by clients quickly. In addition, it helps you build your portfolio throughout the entire course.

This course is vital in speeding up your workflow and illustrator performance. It has nine sections and 219 lectures with four downloadable resources.

11. Become A Professional Graphic Designer

This beginner-level paid course is ideal for individuals who want to become professional graphic designers by learning the principles of graphic design, visual communication fundamentals, and successful layouts in graphic design.

It has 39 sections and 203 lectures. The four downloadable resources play a prominent role in enhancing your knowledge about graphic design and making your course easy.

12. Digital Design Masterclass For Graphic Designers

This paid course on Udemy allows you to learn a variety of digital design projects like Icon design, website layout, digitizing sketches, social media campaign design, digital display Ads, and more. You can learn many practical Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator tools like the Warp tool, Layering Masks, Content Aware tool, Pattern tool, etc.

After completing this course, you can create a dynamic social media campaign using hand-drawn assets. This course has 13 sections with 67 lectures. The five downloadable resources are vital in making your course easy and flexible.

13. Graphic Design Portfolio And Creative Design Basics

This exciting course helps you learn practical design principles, e-practicing tools, creative designs, live projects, graphic design portfolios, and more. One of the many reasons why I chose this course to enhance my knowledge about graphic design was because it allows you to work on live projects together to use the knowledge and skills you learned from the course to create social media posts and banner ads.

Furthermore, you can learn about imaginary layouts from this course and tips on creating and adapting designs to different dimensions of social media. This curriculum has six sections and 39 lectures with 12 downloadable resources that you can complete within 7 hours and 8 minutes. Another good part about this paid course on Udemy is that it provides full-time access to individuals through mobile phones and laptops.

14. Graphic Design Theory – Color And Contrast

Colors and contrasts are the most fundamental components of graphic design. Hence, one must know enough about these two factors when practicing graphic design. This paid course on Udemy focuses on color and contrast theories in graphic design.

After finishing this course, individuals can choose which combination of colors or harmony would work best for their composition. Additionally, it helps you learn the language of design to communicate with your clients, developers, and other creative professionals.

This exciting curriculum plays a prominent role in boosting your confidence by mastering how to analyze designs and asking questions when judging your compositions. It has four sections and 18 lectures with a total length of around 1 hour and 25 minutes.

15. World of Graphic Design And Infographics

This exciting course is about the basics of graphical design and infographics. It enables you to understand the fundamental principles of graphic design, including color theory, typography, layout, and composition. After signing up for this course, you can learn the techniques to research, organize, and visualize complex data into visually appealing and informative infographics.

In addition, this curriculum is vital in developing skills to create visually compelling designs for various mediums such as print, web, and social media. This exciting and short-paid course at Udemy has two sections and 28 lectures.

Are online graphic design courses available in South Africa?

Many institutes in South Africa offer on-campus graphic design courses to students, but people prefer online courses for many reasons. Thanks to numerous online learning platforms worldwide that allow us to sign up for our favorite online courses from any corner of the world through our phones or laptops and learn exciting features of that course.

The same is the case with online graphic design courses in South Africa because these online learning platforms allow you to sign up for your favorite course and learn new skills for your future career.

Is Coursera an excellent place to learn graphic design?

As you know, Coursera is one of the most well-known online learning platforms worldwide, offering online courses in different fields. It is one of the best places for students to learn graphic design because it provides numerous project-learning short courses that help students learn the basics of graphic design.

How much does a graphic design course cost in South Africa?

The price for a graphic design course might vary according to the institute in South Africa. Many online learning platforms like Coursera offer free graphic design courses, while others like Udemy offer paid courses at different costs. Therefore, the price for a graphic design course varies with the course duration and curriculum.

What is the benefit of a graphic design course?

As I mentioned in the above article, graphic design is one of the leading fields in the world because of the increasing demand for digital media. In such times, graphic design courses play a fundamental role in opening the doors of career opportunities and freelancing opportunities for graphic designers. Moreover, these courses keep you updated with the latest design trends to keep you ahead of the competition.

Why should you pursue a graphic design course in South Africa?

Graphic design courses are prominent in opening the door to career opportunities for graphic designers in web designing, advertising, packaging, branding, etc. Therefore, one must consider pursuing a graphic design course in South Africa because of its increasing demand.

The above article contains a detailed list of the 15 online graphic design courses in South Africa that you can pursue to enhance your knowledge and learn new creative and design skills. This list contains numerous free and paid studies so you can choose the most suitable one according to your requirements and qualifications.

Although multiple institutes in South Africa offer graphic design courses, many people provide online courses because they are more accessible, flexible, and better than on-campus courses. The above guide also discusses the factors to consider when choosing an online graphic design course in South Africa. You can read the above article to explore further details regarding graphic design courses, their significance, benefits, etc.