What you'll learn

- This course is broken into three primary sections, the why of visual communication, the who of visual communication, and the how of visual communication. Some of you may be inclined to skip ahead to the how section, while others may prefer to start from the beginning and work their way through each lesson. This course has been designed to make it easy for you to jump around to glean quick tips when necessary, but I would encourage you to follow the lessons in order to get the most out of the full course. Oftentimes, understanding the why and the who will help make the how far more achievable. To help you consider which route is best for your learning objectives, let me break down each of these sections in more detail. The why of visual communication, this section dives into the nature and nurture that drives our demand for visual communication. You'll walk away from the section of this course with a thorough understanding of what makes us all tick, which is vital information to understand how to create great visual content. The who of visual communication, this section is all about your audience and how you can move them to action. You will learn how to identify your target audience, how to develop a creative brief that ensures success in your work, how to identify the right solutions for each audience type, and more. The how of visual communication, in this section of the course, we're going to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Here, you're going to learn how even the smallest of visual cues have a large impact on your audience. You'll learn what factors matter most when developing successful visual content, how to test your content against those factors, and how to identify visual communication mistakes before your audience sees your content. You don't need to be a graphic designer to take this course, nor do you need a mastery of any graphic design tools. Access to Adobe Illustrator, though, is a plus, but not a must for this course. In fact, if you're looking for a deeper dive, how-to guide for developing great visual communication in Adobe illustrator, I suggest you check out some of my other courses, like Learning Infographic Design and Data Visualization: Best Practices after this course. Finally, while it isn't a necessity, you may find that my book, "Killer Visual Strategies," acts a good complement to this course. The book follows a similar cadence, while expanding upon every topic and providing unique exercises to test your understanding of key concepts. It also includes myriad quick reference materials, like a pricing guide outlining various types of creative content, and what you should expect to charge or pay for the work. If you choose to use "Killer Visual Strategies" as a textbook for this course, please download the associated exercise file, called textbook guide, which lets you know what pages in the book provide further context for each video in this course. Now that I've set your expectations, let's get started with the 20 rules of visual communication.