Today’s world is empowered by Internet where everything is right under your fingers. You can do a whole lot of things while just sitting on your computer. Same goes for design courses, as you don’t need to physically join an institute when you have so many virtual options to choose from.

The web world is inundated with online graphic design courses offered to both beginners as well as advanced designers. However, learning from virtual world is still a bit tricky, unless you know some useful tips.

So in this post I’m going to highlight some of the best ways to aptly learn from online graphic design courses. Let’s take a look at the following tips:

1. Practice Breads Perfection

The first thing to know about learning from online graphic design courses is that you cannot just take in everything. Learning of any kind should be a looped process. You learn and then practice and during practice you’ll know what you missed. So you can go and learn again and practice again to see if it worked.

I bet with this looped process of learning and practicing, you will be able to grasp a lot more than just taking everything in.

2. Learn When You Feel Like It

As online graphic design courses are available to you all the time, one tends to over-do the learning process. The key is not to feel pressured and learn at your own pace. Some people push themselves to take tutorials even if they’re not completely into it. That leads to boredom and causes you to be counter-productive.

Try to join the online course when you really have the feeling to learn. For instance, you want some break from your run-of-the-mill tasks or have some free time to spare. This way the online learning process would not feel like burden.

3. Take Breaks between Learning Sessions

You don’t need to go head-on towards the learning process from an online graphic design course. Rather, take breaks and interval in between your learning sessions. This has been scientifically proven that taking intervals in learning can help you better memorize things.

You can even sleep over after a learning session so when you wake up, you’ll have a fresh mind and newer perspective towards the task in hand.

4. Try to Couple with a Real Project

This is my personal experience (and another emphasis to the point number 1) that if you have an actual graphic design project at hand, you’ll be able to learn from your online course much better.

Though it is not completely necessary, but try to couple your online graphic design learning with a real project (even if it is a small one). Trust me, the things you’ll learn in this process, you’ll never be able to forget.

Bonus – Top Free Online Graphic Design Courses

MIT – Online Open Courseware

Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT, offers a great online open courseware. It is a database of free courses by professional academic teachers and course writers. All the offers in this courseware are high quality and free for everyone.

Udemy – Introduction to Graphic Design

The famous online learning platform, Udemy offers a number of online courses from a gamut of fields, and graphic designing in one of them. Tough this course is a free offereing by Udemy, however for more quality and advanced courses you can get a paid option too.

Canva Design School – Intro to Graphic Design

Canva, a popular design software, has this amazing design school for eager learners. Though the design school has various design courses, however, there is a free course “Intro to Graphic Design” for newbies who want to get their feet wet in the design world.

Envato Tuts+ Design Courses

Whoever is starting into graphic design would and should know about Envato Tuts+ website. It has a really useful tutorial archive to help you learn almost any software and process in design. Although most courses in its design database are paid ones, however there are free options too so you can get a taste of what you’re getting into.

Creative Pro – Design How-Tos

A popular online design magazine, Creative Pro also has a great ‘How To’ section with videos and articles for experienced designers who want to expand their skills. Beginners could pair these more specific how-to articles with some of the other resources.

Alison Online – Graphic Design Courses

A cool website that offers certified learning in the field of design, Alison Online is full of different types of courses that offer you to earning a test-based certificate. Having a certificate in a specific field of design can increase your chances of getting a good job.