Portmint Design Basics: Layout, Type & Color
Taught by PipWelcome aboard
Ahoy — Pip here, your lighthouse keeper. Good design can feel like a magic touch some people are born with. It isn't. It's a small set of plain rules, used with care, the way a tidy harbor follows a few simple habits.
In this course we'll meet those rules one at a time. How to make the most important thing look most important. How to line things up so a page feels calm. How empty space does real work. How to pick fonts and colors without guessing, and how to keep words easy to read for everyone.
You won't leave a professional designer. You will leave able to look at any page, poster, or slide and know why it works — or how to fix it. Let's cast off. 🔦
- What Design Actually Is Free previewDesign isn't decoration — it's arranging things so people understand them quickly. Meet the four tools you'll use all course.
- Visual Hierarchy — Guiding the Eye 🔒Hierarchy decides what people see first, second, and third. Learn the simple levers — size, weight, color, and position.
- Alignment — Invisible Lines That Tidy a Page 🔒Alignment makes a page feel calm and professional. Learn edge alignment, the power of a grid, and why fewer lines beat more.
- Whitespace — The Power of Empty 🔒Why empty space is active design — it rests the eye, groups related items by nearness, signals quality, and needs comfortable margins too.
- Choosing and Pairing Fonts 🔒Fonts have personalities. Learn serif vs sans-serif, why two fonts is the safe limit, and how to pair them without clashing.
- Color Without the Guesswork 🔒Color feels mysterious but follows simple rules. Build a small, calm palette with one main color, neutrals, and a single accent.
- Contrast and Readability 🔒If people can't read it, design failed. Learn contrast between text and background, comfortable text size, and line length.
- Putting It Together — Your Flyer 🔒The capstone. Combine hierarchy, alignment, whitespace, type, and color into one clean event flyer you design from scratch.
What you get
- 📚8 plain-English lessons, taught by Pip — no jargon, no prior tech knowledge needed.
- ✅A quick quiz after every lesson, so what you learn actually sticks — and your progress saves as you go.
- 🎓A verifiable Portmint Certificate when you finish — reviewed by a real person, and worth listing on your résumé and LinkedIn.
- ♾️Lifetime access, yours for good — learn at your own pace, revisit anytime.
- 🐙Ask Pip anything as you learn — he's right here on the page.
- 💚Free for Portmint employees — just sign in with your Portmint account.
Start free — unlock the rest when you're ready
The first 1 lesson is a free preview. Then $99 unlocks all 8 lessons plus the certificate — yours for good, no subscription.
Start the free preview →🎓 Capstone — build it, share it, get certified
Finished the lessons? Prove it. Build a clean one-page event flyer you design from scratch — clear hierarchy, aligned blocks, generous whitespace, two fonts, and a readable color pair that uses what you learned here, then share it publicly and thank Portmint for the education, and email it to capstone@portmint.net. A real person on the Portmint team reviews every submission — pass, and you earn a verifiable Portmint Certificate worth listing on your résumé and LinkedIn. (Optional, but it's how a course becomes something real.)
Submit my capstone →