Best graphic design courses, online and in person

We are a design studio, not a school. We have hired designers, briefed freelancers and fixed a great many files that arrived from people with a certificate and no idea what bleed is. This list is what we would tell a friend who asked where to start, grouped by what you actually need: to find out whether you like the work, to learn it properly, or to get a qualification an employer recognises.

No provider paid to be here and none is a partner. Fees and intakes change, so check the provider before you plan around anything on this page. Where we say a course is good, we mean its graduates can do the job.

Before you pay anyone, spend a fortnight making things. If that fortnight is a chore, a course will not fix it. These cost nothing and are good enough to produce real work.

The difference between these and a pile of videos is a sequence, deadlines and someone looking at your work. That last one is what you are paying for.

A room full of people doing the same thing, with a tutor who tears your work apart kindly, is still the fastest way to get good. These are the names we see on strong portfolios in the three countries we work in.

If none of these is near you, the online list above plus a local short course in a software package is a respectable path. Several of the designers we have worked with came that way.

Here is the part of the job a course rarely teaches, because it is not glamorous and the tutor may never have sent a file to a press. It is also the first thing a studio checks in a portfolio, because it separates people who can design from people who can deliver.

• Bleed, trim and safety. Anything that reaches the edge of a printed piece must run 3 mm past it, and nothing important sits within 3 mm of the cut. If you do not know why, you are not print-ready yet. Our free print file check adds bleed and trim marks and shows you what they mean.
• CMYK, not RGB. Screens mix light; presses mix ink. A bright RGB blue goes dull on paper, and a course that only ever exported for Instagram will not have shown you that.
• Resolution at the finished size. 300 dpi at the size it prints, not at the size it was downloaded. A 1,000-pixel logo on a 2-metre banner is a blur.
• Vector for anything that scales. Logos, icons and cut paths are drawn, not painted. If your logo only exists as a PNG, the sign shop will redraw it and charge for it; our vectorize tool shows what that redraw involves.
• Fonts outlined or embedded, images linked, one PDF. A press does not open your InDesign file. It opens a PDF, and the PDF has to carry everything.
• A proof the client can approve. Design is not finished when you like it; it is finished when the client has signed it off and the file matches what they signed. Our content proofing checklist is the version of that we use in the studio.

A portfolio of invented brands for invented coffee shops tells us you can make something pretty. A portfolio of real jobs tells us you can take a brief, survive a client, and deliver a file that printed. Three ways to get real jobs before anyone will pay you:

• Offer a local business one piece for free, on the condition that it actually gets printed or posted. A menu that exists beats ten that do not.
• Redesign something that is genuinely bad and show both versions. Explain what was wrong, not just what you changed.
• Document the production, not just the design: the dieline, the proof, the photo of the finished thing on the wall. That is what a studio wants to see.

Getting that first real piece printed is cheaper than people expect. In Australia, our own print desk, HSH Prints, will quote a short run of business cards or flyers the same day, and its file formats for print guide is the one-page version of the section above.

Our own portfolio is laid out that way, for the same reason: the work is shown as it was printed and posted, at its own proportions, with the client named.