The Best Places to Learn to Design Across 5 Different Mediums.

Back when I started, there was no UX or Product or Marketing, just Web Design. And we didn’t have boot camps; we had to bootstrap. There are so many more ways to learn design today. Here are a few of the best ones I know.

The best ways to learn Design today

Take a class online (at sites like Lynda, Coursera, Codecademy, Udemy, or Treehouse) or join a BootCamp at locations like General Assembly, Bloc, CareerFoundry, or IDF) to get a certification. Structured learning, whether online or in a classroom, is a great way to gain knowledge, mentors, a community, and confidence.

Take a class online (at sites like Lynda, Coursera, Codecademy, Udemy, or Treehouse) or join a BootCamp (at locations like General Assembly, Bloc, CareerFoundry, or IDF) to get a certification. Structured learning, whether online or in a classroom, is a great way to gain knowledge, mentors, a community, and confidence.

However, if I was still looking for more independent means of growing as a designer, here are some approaches.

📚 Read

For understanding the user, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. For starting to shape user interfaces, Practical UI (self-published ebook) by Ahdam Dunnaway, get you a solid base understanding and actionable ideas to put to use.

📺 Watch

YouTube can provide targeted solutions like Kevin Powell for CSS or Ania Kubow for coding. For broader design, I subscribe to CharliMarieTV.

🎧 Listen

To get immersed in Design Better and UI Breakfast are top of my list. Also, a bit more code-centric, the Ladybug podcast is impactful.

`✉️ Subscribe

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🏁 Begin

The best way to gain mastery is to get in the game. The 100 Days of Design Challenges from Daily UI is a direct way to start honing your skills daily.

And share those designs and your thoughts on sites like Twitter, Medium, Dev.to, Dribbble, or Instagram. There is a community of designers ready to support you, including me.

Please feel free to reach out and let me know where you are on your design journey. 😀

Disclosures: All thoughts are my own and not my employer's. None of the links provided is an affiliate link and I earn no compensation from writing this, in fact, if “time is money” it surely cost me to write this cause there was a lot of researching and wiring up all those links. But I actually had the AI tool ChatGPT find most of the URLs for me, that’s going to be pretty powerful as we learn to use it more efficiently and effectively.