- Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel.
If you're new around here,
my name is Charli and I'm a designer.
Today we're gonna talk about learning
because learning is something that never stops
when you're a designer.
(cheerful music)
When I was getting started with design,
I went to design school and I studied a Bachelor of Design
with honors in Visual Communication Design
but since finishing university and being out
in the real world, there's still a lot more learning to do,
things that I perhaps didn't learn during my degree
or just things I need to supplement my learning on.
And my favorite way to learn these days
is through online courses.
In this video, I wanna tell you about three online courses
that I've taken and really found a lot of value in
and give you some advice for selecting
online courses to take yourself.
My favorite online course I've ever taken
is the designer's pricing class by the NuSchool.
I enrolled in this class in quite a panic one day
when a big client project came in
and I really had no idea how to price it,
before then I'd just been doing fairly small
freelance things, charging a couple of hundred dollars each,
but this was a branding design that I knew
I should be charging thousands of dollars
rather than hundreds and I didn't know how to justify
the pricing and how to figure it out.
And this course was amazingly helpful for that.
Some of you design YouTube fans might already be subscribed
to Ran's YouTube channel, Flux,
he makes great videos and so as you can expect,
the videos that are part of the course that he made
with his co-founder Lior are excellent quality,
they're really well-written, well-scripted,
they've got lots of funny bits thrown in as well,
which made the course really enjoyable to take.
Most importantly, though, of course they give really
valuable information in it
and in it, I learned how to price my work,
how to create a proposal and I know for sure that some
of the tips and tricks I learned during this course
are what helped me win a few freelancing jobs
and I'm very very glad that I took it, it's great quality
and well worth the $297 that it costs,
so if you're new to freelancing and if you're trying
to figure out this whole pricing thing,
this is the course for you to take.
Next up is a course that I'm doing at the moment
and that is Treehouse.
Now Treehouse is an online code school,
is basically how I would describe it,
and they've got many many different tracks
that you can take, so rather than purchasing one course,
you purchase a subscription and then you can dive in
and take as many of the tracks or courses as you like.
At the moment, I'm going through the Wordpress one
because the ConvertKit website is built on Wordpress
and so that's what I need to learn
but there's many others in there and I learned a lot
of code basics through Treehouse when I was getting started
in this coding journey.
Treehouse subscriptions are $25 a month, I think,
and again, it's well worth it,
the quality of all of the tutors and the videos
and the lessons are really excellent
and really worth your money.
What I like too is that interspersed between video lessons,
there's little tests, so maybe it's a coding test
where you have to write something and then it'll check it
or maybe it's a quiz where it's like multi choice
but it's really great for keeping your brain active
and making sure that you're taking in
all the information that you're learning,
which can sometimes be a problem for me with online courses
so I really appreciate that and if you're wanting to learn
to code, then Treehouse is where I would suggest you start.
The last one is one of the first online courses
that I ever purchased and that is Learn Lettering
by Sean McCabe.
This is an expensive course, I'm not gonna lie,
it costs $699 for the master class
and I was lucky enough to buy it before the price went up.
This is a course, as the name suggests,
for learning lettering.
I'm gonna be honest, this is a very long course
and I've not even finished it yet
because lettering hasn't been much of a priority for me
but I've got access for a lifetime
so I know that it's gonna be there for me
whenever I wanna dive in and take a lesson
and I've been through quite a bit of it
and all of the videos are amazing quality,
as you would expect from Sean McCabe
because everything he does is amazing quality.
And he's really good at teaching the basics of lettering.
My favorite part of this class, though, and the most value
I've gotten out of it is the business side,
so he's got several levels of this class,
there's like a start, intermediate,
and then the master class, and in the master class,
it features not only learning lettering
but learning the business side of it as well,
how to sell yourself as a lettering designer
and be a freelancer, creating lettering for people
or for clients, and it's that business side
that I've found to be incredibly useful and it's helped me
throughout all of my freelancing projects
and he gives a proposal template and a contract template
that I still use to this day
and for me, that's what makes this course really worth it
is the business side combined with
the learning creativity side.
So those are some of my favorite online courses
and I will say that personal recommendations go a long way
when you're selecting an online course.
I personally like to take something when I can see
other people have taken it as well,
maybe there's some testimonials and they can tell me
what value they've gotten from it so I can judge for myself
what value I'll get from it as well.
If you search for the thing you want to learn in Google,
you'll likely come across many different courses
but I would say the number one thing to think about
when choosing an online course,
before parting with your money, is who is teaching it.
Understand the course creator's backstory,
where they came from, what they do, what the quality
of their work is like, and the quality of the rest
of their content is like, so it'll give you a good judge
as to what the course will be like as well.
Basically just make sure that you're investing in something
that has someone behind it who is a professional,
who knows what they're doing, and can be trusted
and you can probably tell this from their social media
and the output of their other content,
and again, through testimonials.
That is all the advice I have for you today,
I hope you liked this video and found it useful,
give it a thumbs up if you did.
Making an online course is something that I am planning
on doing myself in the future but I'm not quite ready yet,
I don't quite know enough yet to put that into place
and I wanna make sure that when I do create a course,
it is absolutely top notch quality and awesome value
for anyone who would want to take it,
so it's in the works, but not just yet.
I would love to hear about your ideas for courses
down below, if there's anything in particular
that you'd want to learn from me, let me know,
and we can see if we can make that happen.
Thank you for watching, hope you have a good day,
and I will see you next time.