How to learn interior design to become an Interior Designer or you are just interested in learning more about interior design and rather you are learning interior design to become an Interior Designer or just for interest, there are various learning methods available inorder to learn interior design.
Before you move forward to learn interior design, it is important to ask yourselves a couple of important questions, Your answers to these questions will determine what route/method you will need to take inorder to learn interior design. Lets take look at some of these questions that you will need to consider:
- are you learning interior design for a career change?
- you are seriously thinking to become an Interior Designer as a career choice?
- what are your objectives and goals in learning interior design?
- is interior design your passion? do you love it?
- is interior design just a hobby?
- are you learning interior design because you are planning just to decorate your home?
- are you just trying to find out more about interior design to see if you enjoy doing it and then maybe a career change in the future?
- you heard interior design is interesting and fun and you just want to try it out to see if you like it?
- you want to start something new on the side and maybe turn it into a full time thing in the future?
Each of the above question can lead you to a different path in knowing how to learn interior design and there are a number of ways or methods you can learn interior design. Let examine some of these learning methods in more details.
How to Learn Interior Design with Books and Magazines
Learning interior design is not hard. There are plenty of interior design books, magazines and training books out there in the market for you to learn and most of them can be found in any book stores and at your local library.
There are major differences when selecting books and magazines. Most of the time, magazines contains alot more pretty photos of interiors and very little instructional or learn-able information. Due to the extend of nice pretty photos magazines contain, magazines are better used for interior design references and learning about color, finishes and materials.
However, interior design related text books most of the time are produced differently with a different purpose. Most text books contain much less pretty photos and contains more texts for learning. Interior design text books are more instructional in nature therefore suitable for learning the how to(s). However, most How to interior design books tend to be very introductory and tend to miss alot of the intermediate to advance level learning or training in interior design. Therefore, finding the right “how to learn interior design books” will be important.
Interior design magazines are great when they are used as project references and a brief review of the Designer’s project intentions.
Learning interior design with books and magazines is most ideal if you are just learning interior design for fun or wanting to learn some basic how to interior design skills and maybe even just to perform some basic decorating to your home, business or office space.
Lastly, you can only learn so much from books and magazines as most How to learn interior design books and magazines does not cover many of the in-depth interior design professional training requirements.
How to Learn Interior Design with in-Person Classes
Actually attending classes in interior design one of most popular method to learn interior design. This method of learning will allow you to have direct face to face interaction with the instructor(s) and other classmates. It can be very effective in-terms of learning if you have selected the right interior design course(s) and the right instructor(s) that cater to your interior design training objectives and goals. Again, it is important that you define the reasons and the objectives for your interior design training as this will help you in selecting the type of interior design school and classes. As a result, this will affect how you will learn interior design.
Lets dive in and take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of taking in-person classes. Lets take a look at some of the advantages:
- you get to have real time face to face interactions and learning with your interior design instructor(s) (provided the instructor(s) is armed with lots real life practical experiences. You need to be careful here in selecting the instructors as many instructors may have only a few years of real life working experiences and most of their career may only be in academic teaching.
- you get to have real time face to face interactions with your classmates. However, based on experiences, having design input from classmates are fine but most of the time the input(s) are very weak, not very helpful and most of the time, incorrect.
- you get to attend and choose your own interior design institute or even University to study.
Now lets take a look at some of the disadvantages:
- it will take you anywhere from 2 years to 5+ years to finish your interior design study.
- one to one interaction with your instructor(s) can be limited as most interaction with the instructors will be in a group setting.
- tuition fees will be and can be high and sometime very high.
- if you selected the wrong courses you will wasted your time and money.
- if you have a not so good interior design instructor, you will wasted your time and money.
- you will learn alot of interior design theory and learn very little real life practical interior design skills.
- there will be very little focus on the business of interior design which is a very important area of study for any serious Interior Design student.
- majority of your instructors will most likely be academics and will lack sufficient up-to-date interior design skills and knowledge. Therefore, all you will be learning is just lots of theory.
- too much theory will land you no job and be unemployable once you have graduated and will take you longer to find work and 99.9% of the time, only entry level interior design work with low pay.
Interior design theory is great as knowledge. Real life practical skills are crucial in an interior design education.
So as you can see, there are good and bad points going to an in-person interior design class or program. Normally, going into an in-person interior design program at a College or University level will take you longer to gain the practical experiences and you may have to work for a longer period of time, work for different firms inorder to gain the experiences, before you can start your own interior design company or be more stable in the profession.
How to Learn Interior Design with Online Courses
Learning interior design by taking online courses is probably one of the quickest and fastest way to learn interior design. There are tons of online interior design courses available for you to choose from. However, currently, most of the online interior design courses are more for interior decorating for residential development or not for more advance residential and commercial projects. Furthermore, the training for an Interior Decorator is very much different then the training for an Interior Designer.
Lets take look at some of the advantages in taking online interior design courses:
- you can access the online courses fairly quickly 24 hrs a day 7 days a week
- for some courses, you may even have access to instructors 24/7 via video chat, emails or live chat.
- interaction with the instructors are usually one to one.
- there are alot of interior design courses online to select
- tuition fees can vary from low, medium to high. Generally, fees are lower then in-person classes
- you always will have access to interior design courses to study no matter if you are a beginning interior design student or an experienced Interior Designer.
- with online interior design courses or program, you can work full time, keep your job and study at the same time.
- depending on your pace of studying, you can finish the course or interior design program fairly quickly within few months to a year then spending 4-5+ years attending a college.
Some of the disadvantages with online courses are:
- you don’t get real time face to face interaction with your classmates or instructors.
- some interior design courses or program can get very expensive.
- online interior design courses tend to be catered more for interior decoration learning then true interior design learning.
- most of the time, college/University level courses in interior design are not available online.
- most online interior design courses does not provide commercial nor larger more complex residential interior design training.
- most online interior design courses does not provide in-dept real life practical project skills and learning.
- interior design business skills are also lacking in most online interior design course learning.
There are lots of online interior design courses to choose but selecting the right course or program to suit your needs can be difficult.
When choosing online interior design courses to learn, students should understand what their interior design objectives and goals are in interior design. Only by understanding your own needs you then can narrow down to the courses or program that is suitable for you.
Lastly, lets take a look at another alternative methods of interior design learning and that is ” Self-Learning ” interior design.
How to Learn Interior Design with Self-Learning
When talking about self-learning in interior design, most of you probably will think of learning by books and videos etc. No doubts these are some of the method of self-learning. However, the best approach of interior design self learn is by combining the above 3 learning methods. This way, this will provide you the best learning environment all at your own pace while you can still keep your full time job.
Depending on the self-learning schedule or program you put together for yourselves,
