Top 10 Free Web Design Courses and Tutorials

Take your skills to the next level with this handy list of the best online web design courses.

Top 10 Free Web Design Courses and Tutorials
Portrait for Andrew BlackmanBy Andrew Blackman  |  Updated July 18, 2023

Want to brush up on your web design skills? Here’s a list of free web design courses and tutorials that will teach you everything you need to know about Adobe XD, Figma, UI design, and much more. Also feel free to download a free Figma UI kit!

1. Learn Web Design for Beginners

We’re going to highlight a lot of free web design tutorials on a range of specific topics in this post, but let’s start with something more general. The utterly comprehensive Web Design for Beginners course gets you up to speed with the fundamentals of web design in five hours of free education. With more than a million views, it’s fast becoming the go-to resource for anyone who’s starting out in web design. Jump in and see what you can learn:

2. Build a Random Password Generator in JavaScript

If your website visitors aren’t using strong enough passwords, why not help them generate passwords from random characters? You can let them configure the password length and what types of characters to include, and then copy the password to submit in a form. Read this free web design tutorial to see how to build a random password generator in JavaScript.

random password generator

3. Understand Usability Heuristics

If you want to create a good user experience, you need your app or website to be easy for people to use. In this video, Maddy Beard explains eight rules that you need to follow to achieve maximum usability. She breaks it down to make it easy, using toasters as an example!

4. Build a Website With Squarespace

The Squarespace website builder makes it easy to build a website from scratch. But there are still some important features to learn, and this free tutorial makes it easy for you to get up to speed. Or you could watch this video:

5. Build a JavaScript Countdown Timer

Countdowns are all over the web. You can use them to build anticipation for a sale, count down to the launch of a product or business, and more. But how do you build one? Find out by joining Jemima Abu as she takes you through the full process of creating a countdown timer in JavaScript, with all the source code provided.

6. Learn Figma Auto Layout

Figma is a great app for UX and UI design, but did you know you can use the Auto Layout feature to make your life as a web designer a whole lot easier? If not, settle back and watch this video in which Adi Purdila explains everything.

7. Learn About the Gestalt Principles of Web Design

We’ve covered a lot of practical courses and tutorials so far, but theory is also important: it gives you the foundation for everything you build as a web designer, helping you understand why certain design choices work and others don’t. This article on the Gestalt principles of web design is a great way to build your theoretical knowledge.

8. Learn Sketch

We covered Figma earlier, and Sketch is another app that has taken the web design world by storm. It makes it so easy to design websites, apps, and icons, create prototypes, collaborate with other designers, and more. Here’s a free 2.5-hour course to teach you Sketch from the ground up. Enjoy!

9. Communicate More Effectively

Being a successful web designer is not just about mastering the technology and creating beautiful, highly functional websites and apps. It’s also about dealing effectively with clients. So it pays to check out this tutorial in which Chris Godby shares what he’s learned from running two design agencies over 12 years.

10. Build a Responsive Image Slider

Sliders have been around for years, and they’re an ever-popular technique for product tours, blog posts and other items in a visually interesting way. Some of the older ones, however, don’t work so well on mobile devices, which is a big problem. So watch this video on using Swiper.js to create a responsive image slider that looks great and works perfectly on any device!

Even More Free Web Design Courses and Tutorials

These 10 new web design courses and tutorials should keep you going for a while, but there’s plenty more in the full Envato Tuts+ library of more than 1,250 courses and 28,000 tutorials. There’s sure to be something there for you. Have a look at these recommendations of the best online web design courses from previous months to get some more inspiration.

Enhance UX With Motion Design

Motion design can bring a new dimension to the user experience (UX) for your apps and websites. But it should be used for a reason. Here are three great ways to use motion design to enhance the user experience.

Create a Responsive Mega Menu With UIkit

Complex sites often use mega menus to help users navigate through multiple departments from a single menu. But creating functional mega menus that look great on any screen size can be tricky. This free web design tutorial shows you how to create a beautiful mega menu using the UIkit framework.

responsive mega menu

Master Information Architecture

You wouldn’t build a house without an architect’s blueprint, so why build websites without a solid information architecture? This tutorial by Apple UX designer Andrea Eppy explains what information architecture (IA) means and how you can use it to achieve better results in your web design projects.

Conform to Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) give some great advice on creating websites and apps that are accessible to everyone. But what about emails? They’re often overlooked, but there are important accessibility implications for email campaigns too. Learn how to make your emails accessible.

Create Responsive Typography

When your website adapts to different screen sizes, the text needs to adapt too. So how do you determine what size the headings and text should be on different screen sizes? The best way is to use fluid typographic scales. Learn how they work by watching this video:

Learn Sketch From A to Z

Sketch is a wonderful app for designing websites, mobile apps, and user interfaces. But, like most apps, it has some features that many users don’t know about. Check out this free video guide and discover a new feature for every letter of the alphabet.

Get Up to Date With Bootstrap 5

We all know about Bootstrap by now, right? This popular framework has been a go-to resource for web designers looking to build responsive, mobile-first frameworks for years. But do you know about the new features in the latest version, Bootstrap 5? If not, check out this free course. And if you need a refresher on Bootstrap in general, the course is good for that too.

Create Your First Figma Plugin

Figma plugins are a great way of giving you more flexibility. But what if you want to do something completely new, something for which nobody has made a plugin? Well, you can code your own, of course! It’s not as hard as it sounds. In this free web design course, Adi Purdila breaks the whole process down into simple, easy-to-follow steps.

making a figma plugin

Understand UX Design

It’s all very well learning how to use apps like Sketch and Figma, but sometimes as a web designer you need to take a step back and think about the principles. What is user experience (UX) design all about? What skills do you need to be a successful UX designer? Watch this video for a quick, clear explanation.

Learn a New CSS Feature: “Container Queries”

All good web designers need to stay on top of cutting-edge features. If not, you risk using outdated techniques and missing out on newer, more efficient ways of working. This course looks at a new CSS feature called “container queries”. They’re not yet supported by all browsers, but they could soon become as well known as the traditional media queries. See how you can use container queries to build responsive websites in new ways, avoiding some of the problems with media queries.

Create CSS Masonry Layouts

Pinterest-style masonry layouts are often created using JavaScript, but they don’t need to be. You can put them together using pure CSS, if you know how. In this free half-hour video course, Adi Purdila shows you exactly how it’s done.

Understand SVG Viewport and viewBox

What exactly is the difference between SVG viewport and viewBox? It can be quite confusing, but you’ll be clear on the difference between them and what you can do with each of them after following this simple tutorial. You can either read the tutorial or watch the video below.

Discover Some Cool Figma Tips & Tricks

When you’re just getting started with an app like Figma, you’ve got two options. You can dive into a comprehensive course like our popular Introduction to Figma, or you can watch a quicker video that gets you started right away with five useful tips and tricks for beginners. Or, of course, you can do both!

Learn WooCommerce From Scratch

WooCommerce is a hugely popular eCommerce platform, so if you want to set up an online store, try this free beginner’s course to get fully up to speed. You’ll learn how to get your store set up and start getting the most out of the powerful features of WooCommerce.

Build a Reading Progress Bar

We’ve all seen them, haven’t we—those handy little animated progress bars that appear at the top of an article to show you how far through an article you are. Learn how to add them to your pages using CSS and JavaScript in this web design tutorial.

Build a Weather App

Here’s another useful web design element you can learn to build surprisingly easily using vanilla JavaScript. Add a simple weather app to your website to let users find the weather forecast in the city of their choice. This free tutorial takes you through every step of the process.

weather app

Make Great App Store Screenshots

Designing an app is one thing, but making it look alluring in the competitive environment of an app store is another. This YouTube video shows you how to make better app screenshots using a simple online tool.

Learn Adobe XD From A to Z

What better way to learn Adobe XD than by taking a tour of the software from A to Z? Learn a cool tip or trick for every letter of the alphabet in this tutorial.

Create Smooth Page Animations Using Highway

In web design, there are usually several different ways of getting something done, depending on the outcome you want. Highway is another JavaScript animation library that can help with page transitions, and you’ll learn how to use it in this video.

Master 3D Transforms in Adobe XD

Have you heard about the brand new Adobe XD feature called 3D transforms? They were introduced at Adobe MAX in October 2020, and they offer a very powerful and easy way of creating 3D effects. Either watch the video below or read the free written tutorial to discover exactly how they work and how you can use them in your web design projects.

Know Which Typeface to Use

No matter how much work you put into other aspects of your web design projects, your choice of typeface can make the difference between a successful design and a dud. Watch this free course to learn the difference between various typeface styles, and when and how to use each one.

Typeface styles explained

Learn How to Use Figma

Figma is a great tool for designing user interfaces. If you want to get up to speed with using it, try this fabulous free course. Adi Purdila walks you through its main features and how to use it as a web designer or a developer.

Design for Color Blindness

Here’s a quick tip to help you design websites that people with various common types of visual impairment can still clearly read and understand. Chrome DevTools now lets you check your color scheme for visual accessibility with just a few clicks. See how it’s done in this free tutorial.

Start Using Design Systems

Learning web design isn’t just about mastering new technologies and programming languages. Sometimes, working smarter is just as important. Using a design system can make your design work much more efficient and effective, especially if you’re working within a larger team or organization. See how it works in this free web design course.

Animate Your Prototypes With Adobe XD

Every web designer knows that a prototype is a great way to show clients your design ideas and get approval before building the full site. But most prototypes are static, whereas many sites these days include animation. Fix that by using Adobe XD’s powerful auto-animate feature—explained in full in this free web design course with Dan White.

Animation in Adobe XD

Why spend time designing the perfect site if nobody ever visits it? Optimizing a site for search engines is a must these days, but the SEO rules are always changing. Get the latest updates for 2020 in this free tutorial.

Google rich snippets demo

Learn Sketch From the Ground Up

Boost your web design skills by mastering Sketch, one of the most popular apps for designing icons and user interfaces. This free web design course starts from scratch, assuming zero knowledge. Master the interface first, and then go through each of the essential tools and features and get some practice creating designs of your own.

Sketch course logo

Master Responsive Design in Adobe XD

This is the second of our web design classes focusing on Adobe XD. Earlier we looked at creating animated prototypes, and now this free web design course teaches you how to create responsive prototypes to show clients how your design will look on a range of different devices.

Make a UI Design for a Music App

How would you like to add a slick music app to your web design portfolio? This free tutorial will show you how to do that by walking you step by step through this UI design project in Adobe XD. More importantly, it will leave you with some valuable web design skills and techniques that you can use for many app design projects in future.

Music App UI Design

Embed Video in WordPress

Most of these online web design classes cover large topics, but sometimes you just need help with a simple but annoying problem. For example, how do you embed video in WordPress? This tutorial walks you through the whole process step by step, whether you’re using YouTube or self-hosted video.

Discover Some Essential WordPress Plugins

There are thousands of WordPress plugins out there, covering pretty much every niche you can think of. But while many of them are cool or useful, not many of them are exactly essential. This free course takes you through a series of plugins that web designers should use on any site they run, covering important functions like backup, security, caching, and SEO. Find out how to get your sites running smoothly and safely in this free course.

WordPress plugins

This detailed 2.5-hour course takes you through everything you need to know to master Adobe XD. Join Adi Purdila and learn about artboards, components, responsive design, and much more.

Adobe XD

Keeping your skills current is not just about learning new technologies. It’s also about important concepts like accessibility. Making your sites accessible to as many people as possible is not just the right thing to do; it also makes business sense. You work hard to attract visitors, so why turn some of them away because you’ve failed to make the simple changes that would allow them to view your site? I like this quick web design tutorial because it shows you how to create a style guide for accessibility, while also introducing you to some important accessibility concepts and techniques along the way.

Accessibility style guide example

If you have a website or do any kind of design work for the web, you should be conscious of how to design sites that everyone can view easily—including the millions of people with color blindness, low vision, blindness, or other visual impairments. If you’re not, or if you need a refresher, then read this accessibility tutorial to make sure you’re not inadvertently excluding potential visitors and customers through simple but common design flaws.

Designing for visual impairment

Create Accessible WordPress Themes

Accessibility is crucial when designing WordPress themes in 2018. But how do you ensure your theme is fully accessible to everyone? This tutorial guides you through the essential steps, from using semantic HTML to checking for color contrast and avoiding repetitive link text and more. Read the tutorial to get up to speed.

Accessible WordPress theme example

Make Your Site Accessible for Keyboard-Only Users

Here’s the problem: most web interfaces are designed with mouse cursors and touch interaction in mind, but many users rely on the keyboard to navigate. This tutorial teaches you the important skill of designing for keyboard accessibility. You’ll learn some great techniques for assisting keyboard users and making your sites accessible to a broader audience. Read the full tutorial here.

Make Some Cool CSS Hover Effects

How would you like to make the text on your website more interactive, using just a few snippets of CSS? Learn how to do that in this web design tutorial, in which you’ll see how to make your text get circled, underlined, replaced with icons, and more. See the full instructions.

Discover Some New CSS Units

We all know about pixels, and if you use CSS regularly, you probably know about em and rem too. But what about some of the more esoteric units of measurement, like vh, vmax, or ch? Discover seven different CSS units of measurement and find out how they work and when they’d be useful in this excellent free tutorial.

Design Better User Experiences for Global Audiences

Creating an engaging user experience (UX) is hard enough anyway, and it gets even tougher when you have to consider the different cultural contexts of people around the world. This short tutorial introduces you to some important best practices. It’s also worth reading up on what dark UI patterns are and why you should avoid them.

Better UI for global audiences

Overcome Your Cognitive Biases and Design Better Websites

If you want to be a great web designer, you probably think you need to learn all the latest CSS and JavaScript tricks and master the latest frameworks. While all of that is useful, you’ll also need to do something more important and often more difficult: know your own cognitive biases and work to overcome them. This fascinating web design tutorial digs into some of the weird biases lurking in our brains and shows how they can affect your work as a web designer. Read the tutorial to learn about your biases and master them so you can design better websites.

Overcome cognitive bias in web design

Animate SVGs

We all know about animated GIFs, but did you know that animated SVGs are a great alternative? You can even use them for things other than cute cat memes. Find out how to animate SVGs in this amazing web design tutorial by Adi Purdila.

Master Figma

Figma is taking the web design world by storm. Find out how to use Figma for things like UI design, UX design, app design, and even vector illustration in this newly released learning guide that connects you with a huge range of free tutorials and web design classes to learn more. Start learning Figma today. And you can also check out our new course, Advanced Typography Design in Figma.

Learn More

This post has highlighted the best online web design courses and tutorials that Tuts+ has published recently, but you’ll find a lot more in the full archives, which go back over ten years. So if you’re still hungry to learn more, you can search the full Tuts+ library of more than 1,250 courses and 28,000 tutorials to find exactly what you need to create better websites.

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