10 Free Graphic Design Tutorials for Professionals

Learn all the secrets and techniques of graphic design from the experts

Several areas of expertise fall under the umbrella of design: screen printing, editorial layout, illustration, user experience, and more. Although they may all be connected, each of these skills requires a unique and specific learning process.

To become a true professional, you need to master a bit of everything. The following tutorials include essential tips from big-name professionals that will help you improve your knowledge of graphic design.

Watch the videos, and click on the red link to access the full blog post and get more information on the topics.

Illustrator Tutorial: Essential Tips for Beginners

It’s important to know some of the basic functions that make it easier to manage the program before starting to create your illustration and graphic design projects in Illustrator.

Graphic designer, illustrator, art direction, and typography fan Gilian Gomes (@giliangomes), uses his 15 years’ design experience to teach you how to use rulers, zoom, and screen movement in Illustrator, which will help make your work much faster.

Screen Printing Tutorial: Get Your Illustration Ready to Print

Risography and screen printing techniques have a characteristic impact on your printed illustrations. Screen printing involves squeezing ink through a screen stretched over a frame. Risography is a digital printing system that produces very similar results to screen printing. If you want to print your illustrations using these two systems, it’s very important to know how to export your files to obtain the best results.

Illustrator Jimena Estíbaliz (@jimena_estibaliz) specializes in editorial illustration and often uses risography and screen printing to finish her work. In this tutorial, she teaches you how to create the final files in Photoshop and InDesign to allow you to print your illustrations using these two methods.

Affinity Designer Tutorial: 10 Key Basics for Beginners

Affinity Designer is a revolutionary vector design package that has won the industry’s most prestigious awards, including the Apple Design Award and the Windows Developer Award, since its 2014 launch. But how does this alternative to Illustrator work?

Ros (@ros_vectors) is a vector master and graphic designer who specializes in data visualization and high-end presentation design. In this tutorial, he tells you what you need to know to get started with Affinity Designer.

InDesign Tutorial: How to Create a PDF for Printing

Preparing a file for printing may seem like a simple process, but it requires a little care and attention so that everything goes smoothly. If you are going to need crop marks and bleeding, the process will be a little more complex, but not impossible.

In this tutorial, Leandro Rodrigues (@leon_0), a graphic designer and art director who has been working in the field for over 10 years, shows you step by step how to prepare a file simply and efficiently.

Illustrator Tutorial: 3 Basic Drawing Techniques

Adobe Illustrator is the most popular software for vector illustrations. It’s widely used by professionals around the world because of its infinite resources. Fabi and Carlos, the designers behind Marmota vs Milky (@marmotavsmilky), used this package to create major impact projects for clients including Adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, and Havaianas.

In this tutorial, Fabi teaches us the three most basic ways to draw characters in Illustrator.

InDesign Tutorial: Menus and Windows for Beginners

Adobe InDesign is a program that allows you to create efficient and versatile designs for countless visual formats, such as typography, editorial design, and branding projects across a variety of different media. Understanding your workspace and adjusting it accordingly will help you work efficiently.

Graphic designer Jamie Sanchez Hearn (@jamiesanchezhearn) has worked for visual design firms such as Pentagram and Johnson Banks and teaches at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. InDesign is a staple of his day-to-day work as a designer. In this tutorial, he will give you a tour of a typical InDesign workspace, the functions of each section, and show you how to adjust them to your needs and preferences so that you can begin confidently with the software.

Creativity Tutorial: What a Mood Board Is and How to Create One

A mood board will provide any visual branding project with the foundational elements to become a success. In many cases, the better the mood board, the clearer the process, and the better the final result. A mood board can be comprised of anything that will inform the next steps you take in the design process: images, photos, textures, patterns, colors, text, typography, and objects.

Linus Lohoff (@linus_lohoff) is an art director and photographer who has worked for creative agencies such as Saatchi&Saatchi, BOROS & Vasava Studio. In this tutorial, Linus shares his process for how to easily create a clear and effective mood board.

Editorial Illustration Tutorial: How to Adapt to Different Layouts

From the pages of magazines to the headers of online articles, editorial illustration is everywhere, using striking imagery to create engaging interpretations of body text.

In this tutorial, editorial illustrator Emma Hanquist (@emmahan) explains how to adapt your illustration concepts to different types of page layouts and cover mockups, and warns against common mistakes.

Illustration Tutorial: How to Export Your Artwork Step by Step

Exporting a piece of artwork correctly is a vital step in any graphic design or digital illustration project. There is no point in spending hours preparing and polishing a piece in Adobe Illustrator if afterwards its print or the resulting file loses quality and detracts from your work.

That is why graphic designer and art director Silvio Díaz Labrador gives us these key tips to create our projects' final artworks in three different ways according to our needs.

Adobe XD Tutorial: Basic Design Functions

User experience has become an increasingly important part of design—bringing together designers, developers, and other stakeholders to create websites and digital products that users can easily and intuitively navigate. That’s why Adobe XD is such an important tool. A leading vector-based UX design software for web and mobile apps, it can be used to design and prototype wireframes and layouts that can then be implemented and tested.

Ethan Parry (@ethanparry) is a service designer and UX research consultant who regularly uses Adobe XD in his own work. In this tutorial, he explains the software’s basic design functions, which are the building blocks you’ll need before you can begin building your own app.

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- Logo Design: From Concept to Presentation, a course by Sagi Haviv.
- The Art of Record Covers: Illustration Meets Lettering, a course by Steve Simpson.