Graphic design is one of the most popular courses students learn at college, and is a career that many students want to go into once they finish their high school or college education.
However, as with any creative career, graphic design skills are much more about experience using skills in digital programs like photoshop and other visual mediums rather than anything taught directly in a school curriculum.
This is why most people serious about pursuing a career in graphic design or any other creative industry will do exactly this, and take a course that allows them to gain experience using these skills to create visual projects to fill out a graphic design portfolio.
After all, having an advanced certificate or qualification is all well and good, but in reality actual graphic design experience is what employers will be looking for when you are seeking an industry position, whether that's web designers, international advertising designers, or any other line of graphic design work!
But in Toronto, what courses are actually available?
There are actually more than you think, and taking a face to face graphic design, digital design, or online media design course is actually quite easy to find!
Today, we will take you through a few of the best choices for learning graphic design in the Toronto area, to help you get the best experience out of learning graphic design!
User Experience Design Immersive, General Assembly
- Location: 220 King St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 12 weeks, weekdays
- Price: $16,450
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This course by General Assembly is a great way to launch a career in graphic design through user interface design. This type of course is all about using creative skills to gain experience with solving user problems with software, usually which you create.
An appealing and slick user interface is something every single industry needs, creative or otherwise, so having experience with this is how you launch into a career in web design.
The best way to start any career is with experience and a portfolio, and this course will give you plenty in both of these regards, and in just 12 weeks have you ready to work in web design and UI design.
In Vancouver, you can find online and in person classes and tutors for Graphic Design.
Visual Design Course, General Assembly
- Location: 220 King St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 32 hours, weekdays or evenings
- Price: $3,500
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This General Assembly graphic design course is the perfect entry point into the world of graphic design, whichever direction you want your career to take you.
It is perfect for a student just starting out their graphic design journey, able to give you a wide and varied range of experience with the programs you will be working with in your career.
Training in these programs may be provided by some employers, but you make yourself a much more appealing prospect for a company looking to hire for a creative position if you already have mastery of them!
Not least because even the most simple graphic design program, Adobe Photoshop, is already a pricey enough thing to buy on your own, which a course like this can ironically offset by making sure you get the most out of your adobe products.
UX Design, Juno College of Technology
- Location: 483 & 485 Queen St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 48 hours, 6hr/wk
- Price: $2,000
- Difficulty level: Beginner
A great beginner course for getting into web design and UX design, this course from the Juno College of Technology is perfect for those wanting to get a good idea of what working in a modern creative industry is like.
The course focuses on the kind of skills that you will be employing outside of your actual graphic design work, with an emphasis on how to make your designs functional and psychologically effective.
After all, graphic design is always supposed to serve a purpose beyond just anything found in creative arts. Graphic design is supposed to be functional!
There are Designers that took Graphic Design courses in Montreal as it fit better for them.
Adobe Photoshop CC - Part 1 & 2, New Horizons
- Location: 140 King St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 2 days each
- Price: $790 each
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This course is taken in two parts, with the second part building on the first part, for a total of a four-day course to get total mastery of Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop is one of the most common programs you will use either in a career in graphic design, digital media, or web design, and also as a student studying graphic design in any capacity at college.
And at the end of only four days, you come out with a certificate that will be recognized by most international companies as proficient mastery of one of the most popular digital creative programs ever!
Mastering photoshop is a must for any career graphic designer, and it is a program you will have you learn sooner or later in your graphic design work. So why not start early?
UX Design Course, General Assembly
- Location: 220 King St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 60 hours, weekdays or evenings
- Price: $4,500
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This UX design course aims to be fast-paced and comprehensive, giving you the basics of the full range of skills you will need to complete projects in UX design, and the wider skills you will need for an extended graphic design career.
This course aims to give you the full package to get yourself ready to start working in the graphic design industry as quickly as possible.
This means covering learning skills from actual creative arts theory through to professional skills such as how you can use visual design to strategically direct the attention of users on your web page.
This course is best suited to someone wanting to use it as a springboard to launch directly into a career in UX design, as compared to a graphic design college degree or the likes, it is much faster to finish and can get you straight into work.
After a lot of intense research, we also discovered that Calgary was one of the best places in Canada to provide Graphic Design classes to students.
Adobe Photoshop Bootcamp, General Assembly
- Location: 220 King St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 7 hours, weekdays or weekends
- Price: $250
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This course is designed to simply be a direct photoshop workshop for learning adobe photoshop at a basic level.
The entire course can be taken in a single day, perfect for anyone looking to create visual projects on the side with another full-time job or education before moving into graphic design. However, this course alone will be far from enough to actually move into a career in graphic design!
It is a great course to take if you are moving into a position in web design, as many web designers will find their training has better prepared them for that specific role than the entire graphic design industry as a whole, and as such if you move into a position such as graphics or another creative position you might appreciate having photoshop skills as well.
In the same way, Halifax is a good city to learn Graphic Design.
Design Essentials, The Training Company
- Location: 180 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 2 days, weekdays
- Price: $799
- Difficulty level: Beginner
Another course designed to teach you the fundamentals of graphic design, this two-day course is designed to give you a solid grasp of the more design focused parts of a graphic design career.
While this might sound obvious, it is important to remember that as with any creative industry, many of the skills not traditionally considered creative skills are actually just as important.
This course focuses primarily on the creative skills, though, leaving the business side of graphic design less well explored. This allows you to spend the whole time on the course gaining experience in actually doing the graphic design part of graphic design!
UX/UI Boot Camp, UofT SCS Boot Camps
- Location: 27 King's College Cir, Toronto, ON
- Duration: 24 weeks, 10hr/wk
- Price: $10,500
- Difficulty level: Beginner
This longer course is designed to comprehensively cover all of the skills you will need for a career in UI or UX design.
Everything from information architecture and persona creation to qualitative and quantitative research practises, this course will fully prepare you for work in the graphic design industry by teaching you all of the skills, both creative and professional.
This course offers you training in a wide variety of programs as well, allowing you to gain full mastery of any and all digital software you will be expected to be familiar with in the industry.
With the fast evolving world of professional graphic design being what they are, having experience with all the software currently used by the industry is a certificate of quality not many people working in the graphic design field can boast!
You can find multiple courses online that you can be anywhere in Canada and study Graphic Design.
However, even with all of these courses, graphic design remains a very popular course to study, and a very popular career to try and move into. To this end, if you are really serious about progressing a graphic design career, why not reach out to a private tutor on Superprof?
Compared to the prices of many graphic design courses in Ontario, the fees for Superprof tutoring are relatively low, but for the fee you get dedicated one on one lessons, either in person or online, with an industry professional.
Private tutoring is the best way to learn any skill, especially one that can be as abstract as graphic design.
So if you want to really mark yourself out from the competition as a graphic designer in Toronto, reach out to a Superprof tutor. With many of them offering their first lesson for free, it's never been easier!
Did you like this article? Leave a rating!
Loading...
