best online interior design courses

Best Online Interior Design Courses

For any space, whether it is a home, an office or any public space, interior design plays a great role. When the right principles of interior design are applied, it automatically elevates the mood and atmosphere of the space. The following are some of the best online courses for interior design. All these courses are available on Skillshare. While the introductory lesson for most of these courses is free, to access the other lessons and the class projects, you will have to be a Skillshare member.

Top 5 Best Online Interior Design Courses

These are the best online courses for interior design, all thoroughly reviewed to ensure that you find the perfect one for your needs.

The Principles of Interior Design + Instagram Scavenger Hunt

best online courses for interior designThe Principles of Interior Design and Instagram Scavenger Hunt is one of the best online courses for interior design. The course is available on Skillshare and is offered by Tammy Cody, an experienced interior designer based in San Luis Obispo, California.

This is a foundational course for interior design that is meant to take you through the fundamentals and ensure you have a firm grasp of the concepts.

The course is constructed around four lessons — Introduction, Balance, Unity and Harmony, and Rhythm and Balance. All four lessons are delivered through clear and concise videos that have been uploaded on the platform. It is a short, introductory course. The videos by themselves do not take more than 8 minutes to cover. However, the real test of the lessons is in whether students can apply the principles of interior design they have picked up from the lessons to everyday life. In this regard, the instructor has designed a class project which encourages students to recognize these principles “in the wild”.

The class project, titled Instagram Scavenger Hunt, encourages students to pick one of the principles of design and then spot them “in the wild”. Instagram and Pinterest are great places to find design ideas and this class project is meant to help students devise a method to build mood boards through posts found on Instagram. The students are then asked to upload the images they found on Instagram (with appropriate credits), along with a description of the principle of interior design that you recognize in the image.

You can sign up for the class through this link.


Interior Design: Interior Decorate like a Boss

Interior Design: Interior Decorate like a Boss is another example of one of the best online courses for interior design. This course, too, is available on Skillshare. It is taught by Rose Stanek, a designer based out of Seattle. Stanek works as a digital designer with Amazon and has been interested in photography, interior design, and graphic design. The course is meant to take students through the fundamentals of design and equip them to design and create a space from start to finish. Students should be able to create floor plans, experiment with color and a lot more by the end of this course.

It is delivered through 51 lessons which are 1 hour, 4 minutes long in total. There is also a workbook that is provided by the instructor. The workbook is meant to help you navigate the course and track your progress. It has short assignments that guide you while decorating your room. You can pick any room — your own or someone else’s. By the time you are through with your workbook, the room you were working on will be transformed. At the end of the project, you are expected to upload a photograph of the room you have worked on. This course is also best suited for beginners who are approaching interior design from a completely untrained mind. The course has been especially well reviewed for how it has been structured. The concepts build on themselves as the course progresses and a lot of information is conveyed in a short time, without making it complicated.

You can sign up for the class through this link.


How to Use Minimalist Interior Design to Live Your Best Life

How to Use Minimalist Interior Design to Live Your Best Life is another one of the best online courses for interior design. The course is offered by Erikka Fogleman, a professional interior designer. Fogleman runs an interior design business in San Diego, California and has several years of industry expertise. While her focus has primarily been on residential design, she has recently started work on commercial ventures as well.

Through Fogleman’s course, students will be able to navigate the principles of minimalist design and create calmness in the interiors that they design. The minimalist design trend has peaked in popularity in the market and it seems like it is here to stay. The course will help students recognize why this trend is so popular and how they can get it right. The course is delivered through 22 lessons, which can be covered within 1 hour, 51 minutes. At the end of the course, you should be able to understand why the trend is so popular, apply the crucial principles of minimalist interior design, declutter with efficiency, use negative space and a lot more. You should be able to give a minimalist touch to any room after this course.

As a class project, students will be asked to print out a template that will be used as they transform any room in their home. Fogleman will guide each student through this process. At the end of the course, students will have a completed plan of how the room can look after applying all the appropriate principles and techniques of design.

Fogleman is an active member of the Skillshare community and offers several other courses on design. You can take a look at her other courses here.

You can sign up for the class through this link.


Interior Design Essentials: Creating a Color Palette

Interior Design Essentials: Creating A Color Palette is a great interior design course offered on Skillshare. The course is offered by Sarah Earl, an interior designer based in New York City. She has a popular blog called Color Me Quirky. Earl has been in the business long enough to know that the holy grail of interior design is getting the color palette right. Without the right color palette, the design of a room can fall flat. The color palette is one of the basic principles of interior design and Earl’s course is meant to guide students through this.

The class entails eight lessons, which can be covered in 26 minutes. The lessons include videos on ‘basics of color’, ‘psychology of colors’, ‘how to use a color wheel’, etc. By the end of the course, you should be able to identify what is a good color palette and what is not. You will also become well versed with how to choose the right shade of the color for the space you are working on. This is a beginner level course and does not require any prior training.

The course also entails one project that students are expected to complete. The project is titled Flower Power: Incorporating Color with Flowers, and is meant to be an easy way of tracking your progress without going over budget. Students are expected to pick any room of their choice and take a photo of the room to get a sense of color. They are then asked to pick up flowers (from the garden, grocery store or local florist) that they think will complement the existing color palette of the room. Once the flowers are placed in the room, the idea is to spend the next few days thinking about how the colors of the flowers change the space. If it works, the color element can then be translated into bigger, more permanent changes. For example, if the student has placed white gerberas on their dining table and it is elevating the room, perhaps white chairs would be a good way to enhance the color palette? This is a good way of testing out which colors work in a room without committing.

You can sign up for the class through this link.


Interior Design: Plan The Room Of Your Dreams in Photoshop

Interior Design: Plan The Room Of Your Dreams in Photoshop is another popular interior design course offered on Skillshare. The course is offered by Brooke Benfield, an interior and e-designer. She is currently an e-designer with Havenly, an online design company. Photoshop is an important component of modern interior design techniques. If you can draw a floor plan using photoshop, the bulk of your theoretical work is done. It also makes people more confident about taking practical decisions about interior design. Not that if something works on paper it is sure to manifest physically. However, with a detailed model on Photoshop, you can certainly go ahead with greater confidence.

The course covers the basics of e-design and teaches students the fundamentals, like creating walls and floors. There are seven lessons in the course, which can be completed in 34 minutes. The lessons include topics like ‘paint selection’, ‘walls’, ‘floors’, ‘furniture’, etc. The final lesson is ‘accessories and final rendering.’

There is a project that the course involves. Students are expected to select images from Pinterest, based on which they will render a complete room on photoshop. Along the way, they will be expected to share their progress. The milestones of this project will be:

  • Declaring design style
  • Paint selection
  • Design/architectural elements
  • Furniture
  • The final JPEG of the rendered image

You can sign up for the class through this link.


Final Thoughts

When you enter any space, it will be apparent whether or not any thought has gone into its interior design. When the interior design of a place has been considered carefully, it will transform the space. This does not mean you need to pay an interior designer separately to make your space more beautiful.

The courses mentioned above are as much for professionals looking to brush up their skills and find new techniques as they are for non-professionals looking to give their home a makeover or start to learn the craft for future professional use.

If you want to discover more learning opportunities, then be sure to take a look at our list of the best online courses. Thanks for reading and as always, have a great day!

1 thought on “Best Online Interior Design Courses”

  1. Hey, just wanted to say thanks for the great guide, always had a passion for interior design and since we’re all staying at home now due to the epidemic, this is the time to get to work!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *