Designers harness the power of the visual world to create usefulness and inspiration.

Join designers and educators Stan Ruecker and Milena Radzikowska on a transformative journey through the world as designers see it.

Their tried-and-true lessons include plenty of visual examples and fun exercises to give you a foundational understanding of the visual world - what it is and how it's created.

In this course

• You will learn which skills help designers perceive the world with more detail and greater complexity.

• You will discover the value of change through design.

• You will learn how to pay attention to details.

• You will learn the fundamentals of manipulating form and space to create more effective visual communication.

• You will practice giving shape to a creative vision.

What You'll Learn

• Introduction. Stan Ruecker and Milena Radzikowska will show you the building blocks of visual design—what we actually see when we look at the world around us.

• Hierarchy. In this lesson, you will learn to think about how designers draw your attention to some information first, and how simulating human proximity can help you direct readers to focus on your design.

• Grids. Here we describe a powerful tool for bringing visual control to your design. For a graphic designer, everything on the page should line up with something else, or else the elements seem out of place, and the layout can look unnecessarily chaotic.

• White space. In this lesson, we introduce you to the idea that a good design—and its reader—needs room to breathe.

• Gestalt principles. Now you’re ready for slightly more advanced concepts. In this lesson, you will learn about the psychological basis for some common strategies in visual communication design, such as obscuring one element with another, or showing only part of a whole.

• Elements in space. Here we take a bit of a dive into the role played by boundaries, and by the interplay of objects within different boundaries. We also introduce the important term “visual weight.”

• Sameness and difference. One of the skills that designers have is in managing the attention of people who are looking at a design. This lesson introduces the subject from the perspective of what can be ignored and what needs attention.

• Unity & variety. In this further discussion of handling people’s attention, we describe the interplay in any given design between which elements will be perceived as a unit and which elements will disrupt that unity and how a good design needs both.

• Story-based data-driven design. This lesson focuses on the use of data and data visualization to create visual narratives that go beyond simply presenting information and instead use the conventions of stories to make that information more compelling.

• Mockups. Although a lot of the material in this course is about developing your visual power, it would be unusual to deal with design and not talk a bit about making, which is often essential to understanding.

• Describing letterforms. Designers work a lot with type. In this next set of lessons, you will learn to see letters, words, and paragraphs like a designer. First, we start with some of the terminology that graphic designers use to describe letters.

• Describing type. This lesson discusses the terminology related to entire fonts.

• Using type. Now that we have introduced some of the terminology, this lesson delves into best practices in designing with text.

• New Logo for the Mount Royal University Faculty Association. We end our course with a few case studies. The first, is by one of Milena’s students, who walks us through the process she used in redesigning a university logo.

• Reading the virus. The second case study is a design reading of the visualizations used to portray the coronavirus, and what each of them implies to the viewer.

Throughout the course, we share our favourite readings, tools, and resources, as well as show you plenty of examples so you can better understand the beautiful world of graphic design.