Dyizan Academy — A design-skills academy: a staged | dyizanacademy.com
The full self-study order — six stages, 300-500 hours, each stage closed by a project you can show.
The order exists because each stage is a prerequisite. Composition trains you to see balance and emphasis; typography gives you material to set; grid and spacing give the type a structure; color gives the structure a hierarchy; tools turn the result into files; the portfolio proves all of it. Skipping ahead means learning a skill with nothing to hang it on.
Stage 1, composition and seeing, takes 40-60 hours of thumbnail sketches and rule-of-thirds studies on a 3×3 grid, and ends with 30 studies you can defend. Stage 2, typography, takes 60-90 hours: set a 1.25 modular scale from a 16 px base and hold body copy to 45-75 characters per line at a screen line-height of 1.5-1.75.
Stage 3, grid and spacing, takes 50-70 hours on a 12-column grid with 16-32 px gutters and 8-point spacing — the exact values are laid out on the Type, Grid and Spacing page. Stage 4, color and contrast, takes 50-80 hours pairing every text color to a measured ratio; the thresholds and the simulator workflow are on the Color Contrast page.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Stage 5, tools and hand-off, takes 40-60 hours: a vector logo in SVG or EPS, a raster retouch, a UI mockup exported at 2× and a print piece at 300 dpi. Stage 6, the portfolio, takes 60-140 hours of case write-ups that name the constraints and the checks each project passed.
Pace is the lever you control. At 5-10 hours a week the full path runs 6-12 months; doubling weekly hours halves the calendar to the same hour total. Log hours against deliverables, not against days.
The stage hours sum deliberately: 300 hours at the fast end, 500 at the thorough end. Where you land inside the range depends on how many attempts each deliverable takes before it passes its check.
Further reading