How do you learn and improve your motion design skills through online courses and resources?

I think you can learn anything online through tutorials and courses. What makes courses so much more valuable is the feedback on your assignments. Getting honest feedback from others is critical to get better at Motion Design. Tutorials solve "how to" problems, while courses come with much more depth. Learning and improving takes a lot of effort and time. To hold yourself accountable is crucial. It helps to block time in your calendar that is dedicated to learning and exploring. Learning is just the first step. You have to take all your new skills and explore what to create with them, that is yours.

As a motion designer, continuous learning is vital! But it can be overwhelming. The best thing you can do is to implement a learning plan. I like to break mine up into quarters. Example: Q1 - Learning Character Design. Q2 - Learn Storytelling Q3 - Learn how to attract clients Q4 - Learn Blender. It's also valuable to learn soft skills like client communication. People will hire you because you're a great person to work with.

When participating in an online course, I usually watch every lecture continuously. Afterward, I approached the exercises and focused on specific parts where I needed more understanding. Completing homework in a course is crucial, and having someone review it is highly recommended. Exercises with feedback are valuable. If you can see exercises from other students in the course and observe the feedback they receive, it's essential and contributes a lot. Do it. Most course content remains accessible without a time limit, allowing you to revisit it through repeated viewing. Dedicate a defined weekly time to watch the content, do homework, and meet the course deadlines.

There is no shortage of valuable learning resources in this time and age. Me personally, I like to spend my spare time watching YouTube tutorials, and if I like the end result, then rewatching and following the instructions to recreate the design, but with a personal touch. To be good at something, one needs to be obsessed with it, to the point where you find yourself thinking about it at odd times. Learning takes place round the clock. Just apply yourself.

Thanks to an abundance of accessible resources online, you can begin to learn just about any skill, but it’s likely best to focus on an extension of your current skill set and continue to expand from there. Focusing on something related to your existing foundation of knowledge and experience is a great way to maximize the impact of your effort. You may never be a modeling expert, but if you’re fantastic with 2D animation, you may improve rapidly by studying more closely related tools and techniques. Hopefully, that also leads to new skills you can apply to your current role or use to offer more value to existing projects. With that said—it’s never bad to pick up basic knowledge of other specializations!

FOLLOW ALONG! No course is worth watching unless you’re periodically pausing and executing the steps being taught to you. There are many benefits to doing this; the most valuable being retention. This kind of work can be very complex and technical, so commit the expended brainpower to understanding the tools and concepts instead of memorizing the steps. On a related note, try to avoid entering parameters values manually. Instead, click+drag to increase/decrease the value and observe the changes taking place.

Every day a new technique, tool, or platform pops-up with offerings. If you are in the 3D space, Cinema 4D, Houdini, and Maya were once the giants of industry, now Blender 3D is taking the world by storm. Even within specific platforms, new tools and plugins are developed- specifically if it is open source. Right now learning geometry or simulation nodes for Blender is vital for procedural workflows. If you are in After Effects, there are dozens of amazing plugins to help improve productivity, from specific tools like Rift for key management, Ukramedia's Rekt tools for dynamic kinetic typography, or AE Viewer for reviewing footage. Some of the top names in Mograph learning: School of Motion, CG Cookie, Greyscale Gorilla, and Ducky 3D.

For some, building you own "course" through youtube tutorials and other free content can be a great way to upgrade your skills. However, sometimes it's worth the extra expense and spring for a course that lays out a structured learning path for you. Sometime you "don't know what you don't know" and it can be helpful to have a course that lays out a learning path.

Having a community of motion designers to support you is crucial to your success. Especially when attached to courses it can help hold you accountable to complete the work and see the benefit of taking the course. You should always try to surround yourself with people who are better than you and ideally just a few steps ahead of you.

Participating in online courses and attending support groups and communities that are active in the field of motion design, as well as analyzing the works of other artists, can get to know you with new methods and tools, different ideas and scenarios, and influential factors in creating superior works. It can also provide the possibility of creating communications and team working.

- I started my freelance motion design career in 2020 by animating logos. Since 2022, I haven't explored much and got stuck in my comfort zone. - To break this stagnant growth, I sought help from one of my clients, Apeksha Gupta, who became my first design mentor. She reviewed my portfolio and unpublished work, then asked me why I'm holding back my potential and suggested I introduce diversity in my field of work and experiment more to break through the learning barrier by diversifying my work and avoiding monotony. - I made a promise to myself to never stop experimenting with my style and in my personal projects, even if they are of average quality. I will show up and share my journey of practicing motion design online.

For those new to motion design, YouTube is an excellent starting point, offering a wide array of free tutorials. It's crucial, however, to choose videos created by experienced industry professionals. While platforms like Skillshare exist, they might not always provide the high-quality content you need. Patreon could be a better alternative for accessing specialized content once you're ready to advance beyond the basics. The most important thing is to practice what you learn; merely watching videos won't improve your skills. Begin with free resources to build a strong foundation, then consider paid content for more advanced learning.

Unless you're working with Motion Design for fun, consider taking classes in Marketing & Sales. It will help you in the long run to grow your business even further.