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California Institute of the Arts

Visual Elements of User Interface Design

California Institute of the Arts via Coursera

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Overview

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This design-centric course provides a structured, visual communications perspective on user interface (UI) creation. Organized into four key pillars, you will progress from foundational interaction concepts to the formal elements of language, shape, color, and typography. From there, you will analyze active navigational components like menus and buttons before mastering the compositional rules of hierarchy and multi-platform design. Through a series of lectures and visual exercises, you will apply these cumulative skills to design a consistent, user-friendly, static screen-based interface.

Syllabus

  • Foundational Elements of Interface Design
    • Analyze what a digital interface is and evaluate the foundational role a designer plays in its creation. By contrasting a design-centric approach with frameworks focused strictly on marketing or programming, you will establish the baseline principles used to evaluate visual user interface elements.
  • Formal Elements of Interface Design
    • Examine the foundational formal elements—including language, shape, color, imagery, typography, and icons—that constitute a user interface. You will analyze the overarching questions of content, context, and audience that frame UI/UX projects and define the overall design direction, establishing these core components as the formal building blocks for complex, screen-based visual structures.
  • Active Elements of Interface Design
    • Transition from static layout components to interactive user interface states. You will evaluate essential navigational conventions—including menus, buttons, and responsive icons—to analyze how a graphic interface functions and responds to user input. By introducing interactivity to static designs, this module examines how the designer directly shapes the interactive user experience.
  • Composing the Elements of Interface Design
    • Synthesize individual interface components into complex layouts, establishing clear visual hierarchy and structural harmony across a design. You will analyze contemporary interface conventions, design cross-screen navigation systems, and build consistent relationships between varied content types. Concluding with a multi-platform approach, this module examines how to adapt variable content for diverse screen sizes and organize complex information into user-friendly structures.

Taught by

Michael Worthington

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Reviews

5.0 rating, based on 1 Class Central review

4.7 rating at Coursera based on 6398 ratings

Start your review of Visual Elements of User Interface Design

  • Arkan T
    10
    Nice, gentle, but challenging course for absolute beginners in UI design. The videos are very nicely done and looking at the design, these are videos that wouldn't get stale in a few more years.

    Some design background helps, but if you're not a designer, you could probably ramp up to speed by looking at others' works and reading free online article yourself. I find it very beneficial that I could take and retake tests as often as needed, as the peer feedbacks given are very useful. I used a free vector software called Inkscape throughout this course, and also Google Slides to build the PDF files.
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