Graphic Design
The best lessons and design tools for professionals.
graphic Lessons
Designing Data
James De Angelis — Making sense of an infinitely complex world through pictures is not new — Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man allowed a viewer to intimately understand the proportion of the human body wit...
Designing with Grids
Reda Lemeden — The human brain has a penchant for identifying patterns, decoding them, then recoding them for later reuse. Not only does this cycle make it easier for us to understand the worl...
Typography in Practice, and Where to Go from Here
Moiz Syed — The goal of this last lesson in typography is to provide a wide-angle view of this fascinating field, and highlight resources from some of its best practitioners to direct you a...
Responsive Typography In Action
Jem Gold — Typography has always been at the foundation of design & communication. We’re at an interesting point in time where we’re being given previously unknown amounts of control o...
Exploring the World of Typefaces
Sacha Greif — When we look back at black and white movies, we marvel at the results they could achieve without color. Despite this, we can agree color film was a good invention: you can still...
Achieving Visual Hierarchy
Lise Statelman — One of the key principles of design is visual hierarchy, which encompasses almost everything you’ve learned on Hack Design so far. Whether you’re dealing with screen or print me...
White Space: Designing the Invisible
David Kadavy — No matter what visual style is hot, no matter what great product you’re using, every piece of good design uses “white space” well. I’m using this as a blanket term, not only to ...
Building Color Confidence
Joanne Chang — Color is a powerful form of communication. We are so attracted to color and so repelled by it that even if the coolest design were presented to us, if we didn’t like the color, ...
Dive Into Typography
Kerem Suer — In this lesson, we’ll dive right in and learn a few quick – but really important – rules about typography. Before we start the course, let’s define typography quickly. Typograph...
Typography in Product Design
Jared Erondu — A few weeks ago we were introduced to the art of type, and gained a basic understanding of the rules surrounding it. But where does it all fit in? Of what value is typography to...
graphic Tools
Adobe Illustrator
Industry-standard vector graphics software for logos, illustrations, typography, and scalable design work
Adobe InDesign
Industry-standard page layout software for creating magazines, books, brochures, and multi-page documents
Adobe Lightroom
Professional photo editing and management software for organizing, editing, and exporting large photo libraries
Affinity Designer
One-time purchase vector graphics app for logo design, illustration, and print work with no subscription required
Aperture
Apple's discontinued professional photo editing app with non-destructive editing and library management
Canva
Drag-and-drop design tool for social media graphics, presentations, and creating templates that non-designers can use
Capture One
Professional photo editing software known for superior color science, tethered shooting, and RAW processing
Lunacy
Free cross-platform design app with built-in illustrations, photos, and icons
Photoshop
Powerful raster graphics editor for photo editing, digital painting, and image manipulation with AI tools
Pixelmator Pro
Mac-native image editor with AI-powered tools for photo editing, graphic design, and digital painting at a one-time price