Graphic Design Masterclass: Learn GREAT Design
Lindsay Marsh · Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting!
A sprawling 20-hour theory-to-software marathon that trades depth for breadth, best for absolute beginners wanting one map of the whole field.
A survey course, not a specialization
This is less a single course than a stitched-together curriculum: a theory unit on typography and color, then three separate software units for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, each ending in a project. At nearly twenty hours, it covers an enormous amount of ground, and that breadth is both its selling point and its central limitation. A student who finishes it will have touched almost every corner of entry-level graphic design. A student who wants to actually be good at any one of those corners will need another course after this one.
The typography section is the strongest opening because it stays concrete. It walks through the physical vocabulary of a letterform (baseline, x-height, ascender line, descender line, bowls, counters) before connecting that vocabulary to a practical decision: how much kerning to add to a headline, and why the default spacing a font ships with is rarely the spacing a designer should use. The serif-font history lesson, tracing old-style to transitional to didone to slab serif with named examples (Garamond, Times New Roman, Didot, Rockwell), gives students a reference frame for why a fashion logo and a bank logo don't reach for the same typeface. This is the kind of detail that separates a course that teaches taste from one that only teaches software.
The software units are more uneven. The Photoshop section spends real time on object isolation and photo manipulation, including a duotone and gradient-map demonstration that doubles as an explanation of blending modes, useful because it reveals the mechanism behind a look students already recognize from Instagram filters rather than just handing them a preset. The Illustrator section centers on pen-tool tracing through a seven-page worksheet, which is a sound way to build the muscle memory the tool demands, before moving into a full logo and business-card branding project. The InDesign section is the thinnest of the three, focused mainly on master pages and paragraph styles inside a magazine or cookbook layout, and feels more like a features tour than a design-decision tutorial.
Where the course adds and where it thins out
Two additions elevate it past a bare software walkthrough: a lesson on giving and receiving critique, which is unusually candid about the instructor's own unprofessional reactions to harsh feedback, and a downloadable portfolio PDF template in both A4 and US letter sizes. Neither is essential to learning design mechanics, but both address the parts of a design career that most technical courses ignore entirely.
The tradeoff for all this breadth is depth. Branding gets a single project rather than a full process (the instructor's own follow-up course is pointed to for that). Layout and grid systems get an introduction, not a working system. Anyone who has already spent time in one of the three Adobe apps will find long stretches genuinely redundant, since each software section assumes zero prior exposure and starts from tool selection. Reasonably priced as a starting point, this is not a course to reach for a second time.
The standout
The live blending-mode color-grading demo in Photoshop, where a single gradient or brush layer set to Screen or Overlay recolors a photo the way a social media filter does, is a genuinely transferable trick shown at a level of specificity most beginner courses skip.
What you will learn
- How to read typography anatomy (baseline, x-height, ascenders/descenders, kerning vs. tracking) and pair serif/sans-serif/script fonts
- Color wheel relationships, complementary schemes, and basic color psychology applied to a logo
- Photoshop object isolation, non-destructive editing, duotones, and blending-mode color grading on a photo
- Illustrator pen tool tracing, the shape builder tool, and a full logo-to-letterhead branding project
- InDesign master pages, paragraph/character styles, and a multi-page magazine or cookbook layout
- How to give and receive design critique professionally, including a portfolio PDF template
Best for: A total beginner who has never opened Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign and wants one long course that stitches design theory to software basics before choosing a specialty.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows one Adobe app reasonably well, or wants deep, portfolio-ready mastery of a single discipline like logo design or editorial layout.