- 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.
