Learn Design Basics and Build Brand Guidelines for Your Nonprofit

Do the words "design" and "brand guidelines" make your toes curl and teeth grind? Does design lingo make you think you need to hire a professional designer or go to design school? With a solid foundation, you can begin to implement good design practices and build some brand guidelines for your organization.

Elefint, a design studio that works with social impact organizations and nonprofits, teamed up with TechSoup to build our new free design basics course. In this Design for Nondesigners 101 course, you’ll conduct a self-assessment of your organization, watch videos to learn about design, and practice applying what you've learned. The course will also walk you through creating a brand book for your nonprofit or library. After completing this course, you will be able to

• assess your current organizational brand standard readiness
• understand why implementing brand guidelines creates value for your organization
• recognize and define five basic core elements in design and in your organization's brand guide
• identify practical ways to use organizational brand guidelines consistently
• understand basic best practices for developing brand guidelines

Learn design basics

Stay tuned for our Design for Nondesigners 201, coming soon, which will build on this beginner course.

With TechSoup Courses, you can learn some basic techniques and tips that will support you with many of your organizational design needs. We offer Adobe absolute beginners courses that help you build elementary, foundational design skills in Adobe's Creative Cloud programs. We've also developed a web design best practices 101 course that will help you understand the basics in applying best practices for your website navigation, content, and design.

If this is your first time accessing TechSoup Courses, our new online learning platform, please remember that you will need to create an account before registering for any course. Note that this account will be different from your TechSoup.org login.

Think of TechSoup Courses like your local library — first you get your library card, and then you can check out any and all resources at will! With our online learning platform, you own your learning journey — you choose the time, location, and device that is most convenient for you.

We understand that design isn't easy, but we're working to bring you basic courses to increase your design confidence one TechSoup course at a time.

Image: Dragon Images / Shutterstock

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