The Accidental Designer: How to Design Images Like a Pro

We all know this intuitively—websites or flyers that are balanced, colorful, and visually interesting get more attention. But if you work at a small nonprofit, chances are you don’t have much money to spend on a graphic designer. Fortunately, anyone can learn graphic design. Whether you’re already creating visuals for your nonprofit’s communications or are interested in taking this on

and know nothing about it, we can help you gain the knowledge and skills you need to wow your followers with interesting and attractive designs. Join us for a three-week course that will walk you through the fundamentals of design and show you how to get started with the right tools.

During this course you’ll:

All sessions take place Tuesdays at 1:00 pm Eastern and last for 90 minutes.

We’ll begin by delving into the ideas behind good design. We’ll explore how designers use lines, shapes, form, and space as the basic tools for showing depth, movement, or other visual ideas. We’ll also spend time talking about the importance of color and

how to use it to achieve the right effect. And we’ll lay out how typography can affect both what the viewer sees and feels within a design.

We’ll start out by talking through some basic principles of graphic layout. Then we’ll takeit a step further and show you in real time a design being created—explaining the thinking and decisions being made during the process.

Adobe InDesign is the industry standard and is recommended for anyone creating designs that need to live on beyond the immediate moment. That’s why it’s important that we show you a few useful tricks for doing basic design work in InDesign. However, there are a number of alternatives that offer similar functionality and many simpler tools that are free and easy to use. We’ll spend some time reviewing those tools and discussing their strengths and weaknesses.

Please register with the email address where you would like to receive the accesscode and dial-in information for the online seminar.

All registered participants are granted access to the recordings of each session. Participants who cannot attend any of the sessions due to scheduling conflicts will still have access to the course presentation decks and handouts.

Idealware, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, provides thoroughly researched, impartial and accessible resources about technology to help nonprofits make smart technology decisions.