The Importance of Hands-On Photoshop Experience for Graphic Designers

How students of all backgrounds can benefit from our redesigned course

We have redesigned our Graphic Design with Photoshop course to better train beginner graphic design students from all types of creative and non-creative backgrounds who are looking to expand their understanding of graphic design tools, concepts, and terminology. This includes helping students build a portfolio of projects and skills they can implement in the real world.

Demand for skilled graphic designers is rising

The need for innovative, professionally designed interactive media keeps growing, which means the demand for qualified graphic designers will continue to rise. In fact, Burning Glass Technologies reports that 37,630 jobs for graphic designers were posted within the last 12 months, and 40 percent of those jobs required applicants to have a minimum of 0-2 years of experience. It also projects a 4.2 percent growth in the profession over the next 10 years. Due to this robust growth, education that can provide people with the confidence and skills to enter this in-demand field is desperately needed.

The Graphic Design with Photoshop course from ed2go was developed a few years ago to provide beginning and aspiring graphic designers with the skills they need to enter a new career. However, we felt that our course could use some revamping to offer more hands-on, interactive learning that students could apply in the real world—no matter their career field.

Previously, the course focused on creating marketing materials using Photoshop. Its learning path started by teaching students how to interact with clients and contained one lesson on design fundamentals. A typical lesson had eight hours of textbook reading with about one hour of online course content. Many of the projects taught in the course would typically be completed in InDesign or Illustrator in the real world, not Photoshop, and we felt that the 200-hour program length was unnecessarily long. Overall it was a good course for students to get their feet wet in the world of graphic design, but we felt it could be improved.

We have made some big changes…for the better

We now teach graphic design fundamentals bolstered by hands-on projects using Photoshop CC in each lesson of the Graphic Design with Photoshop course. The redesigned learning path will introduce students to Photoshop CC and graphic design fundamentals at the beginning of the course. Graphic design fundamentals are then reiterated as lessons progress and reinforced in each project-based lesson assignment.

The course contains all new Screencast videos illustrating how to use Photoshop tools and create visual elements—replacing videos that were once voice-over PowerPoints. It also includes two key lessons to help boost soft skills needed for employment and guides students through building their professional portfolio using Adobe Behance—a web-based site for showcasing and sharing creative work. This all combines to further give students the tools they need to be able to begin a successful career in graphic design or apply what they learned in their current career after completing the course.

Additional changes we have made:

Program hours have been reduced from 200–hours down to 130–hours
Reliance on textbooks has been reduced by strategically replacing reading with key narrative content
Lessons have been authored so the main concepts are introduced in the online portion of the course
Readings are now assigned to help reinforce conceptual learning
More projects have been added that will give students practice with assignments they are likely to see in the real world
Graphic design concepts are taught starting with fundamentals and are reinforced throughout the course
The use of rich media and video has been increased to make the course more compelling

When will this course be available?

The new and improved Graphic Design with Photoshop course will be available on May 27, 2021. Contact your Account Manager to learn more or to add this course to your catalog today.