Graphic Design Masterclass Intermediate: The NEXT Level
Lindsay Marsh · Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting!
A grab-bag of intermediate Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign techniques strung together by real client-style projects, best for design hobbyists ready to specialize, not total beginners.
Lindsay Marsh's intermediate follow-up to her original Graphic Design Masterclass is less a single course than a stitched-together tour of a working designer's toolkit. Over roughly thirteen hours it moves from design theory into Photoshop compositing, a fast-food ad project, an extensive logo design unit, isometric illustration, InDesign editorial layout, infographic construction, package design, advertising, and portfolio building. The breadth is the point and also the course's main limitation: nearly every topic gets a satisfying single pass and then the course moves on.
Where the course is strongest
The opening Gestalt theory section is the best-constructed part of the class. Rather than defining similarity, proximity, figure-ground, closure, continuation, and symmetry in the abstract, Marsh walks through each principle with a matched pair of examples, a bad layout and a fixed one, a Rubin's vase illustration for figure-ground, a bicycle logo whose negative space forms the letters S and R for closure. It builds a vocabulary that gets reused later when critiquing real print ads and magazine spreads, which gives the theory actual teeth instead of leaving it as a one-off lecture.
The infographics unit is the most technically useful stretch for anyone who has never built charts in Illustrator. The line graph and pie chart demonstrations are unusually specific: breaking a pie graph down by columns rather than rows to generate proportionally scaled circles, then overlaying them with blending modes to fake a Venn diagram, is a real technique with a real payoff, not filler. The logo design project is similarly hands-on, showing a designer using the path offset tool to carve out negative space around an overlapping arrow rather than just describing the concept.
Where it thins out
Other sections read more like a professional narrating their own workflow than teaching a repeatable method. The print design critique lessons, for instance, are essentially Marsh flipping through a stack of magazines and postcards pointing out margins, leading lines, and focal points. That is genuinely useful pattern recognition, but it teaches by example rather than by exercise, so a student comes away with better instincts but no clear checklist to apply independently.
The portfolio and freelance business content, including the "how much do designers make" lessons and the WordPress template shopping walkthrough, feels bolted on rather than integrated. It is practical information, and the bundled InDesign portfolio template with pre-built layouts is a genuinely nice bonus resource, but it sits at a different altitude than the design-skills sections and can feel like padding depending on what a student came for.
Bottom line
This is not a tightly scoped course with one clear arc. It is a library of loosely connected intermediate lessons, some rigorous and technique-driven, some closer to a portfolio review recorded for an audience. Students who already have the basic Photoshop and Illustrator fluency the course assumes will find several individually excellent lessons, particularly Gestalt theory and the infographics unit. Students hoping for a single cohesive project that builds skill progressively from start to finish will find the course's project-driven, take-any-order structure works against that expectation.
The standout
The infographic section's trick of using Illustrator's pie graph tool split into columns to generate perfectly scaled circles for a Venn diagram is a genuinely transferable technique most designers never learn.
What you will learn
- Identify and apply the seven Gestalt principles (similarity, proximity, simplicity, figure/ground, closure, continuation, symmetry) to real layouts and logos
- Use Photoshop's content-aware fill, perspective warp, and photo compositing to blend two images into one believable scene
- Build a logo from sketch through grid refinement using the path offset tool to resolve overlapping shapes
- Construct pie charts, Venn diagrams, and line graphs natively in Illustrator and convert them into custom infographic art
- Lay out an editorial magazine spread and cover in InDesign using dividing lines, leading lines, and type hierarchy
- Assemble a PDF and web-based design portfolio, including customizing a provided InDesign portfolio template
Best for: Hobbyist or self-taught designers who already know basic Photoshop and Illustrator tools and want a tour of intermediate techniques through varied mini-projects.
Skip it if: Complete beginners to Adobe software, or anyone wanting one deep, sequential specialization (e.g. logo design alone) rather than a broad survey.