Interior design courses online: hobby or qualification?

There are two different things called an interior design course online, and only one of them is what the three subscriptions on this site sell. They teach it as a creative subject; none of them offers a professional qualification and none of them claims to.

Work out which one you need before you look at any price, because the two routes differ by more than an order of magnitude in cost and by everything in purpose.

The two routes, side by side

The second column is deliberately empty of numbers. We have not read any institution's fee schedule or entry requirements, and professional recognition rules differ by country and sometimes by state — so this site prints nothing about them rather than something vague.

If it is the hobby route you want

Then a creative subscription is a perfectly reasonable purchase, and the decision is the same as for every other subject on this site: what it charges, what it renews at, and what you keep.

MasterClass runs $120, $180 or $240 a year billed annually. Skillshare is $167.88 a year. Domestika Plus is $164.50 for a first year and then $329, and it is the only one of the three where a course you buy is a course you keep.

Over two years that is $240, $335.76 and $493.50 — and the last of the three is the only one its seller actually printed.

Interior design is a subject people return to intermittently — a room at a time, a flat at a time, years apart — which tilts the argument towards buying a course outright rather than renting a library you will not open for two years. The route is described in Skillshare versus Domestika.

Why this corner of search is unusually noisy

Interior design carries some of the highest advertiser interest of any subject in this lane, which means a large share of what ranks for it was written to sell something rather than to answer the question.

The practical defence is the same four questions this whole site runs on, and they take two minutes on any page you land on.

1. Is there a price, with a date next to it?
2. Does the page say what the thing renews at?
3. Does it say what happens to your access when you stop paying?
4. Does it name any option that pays the writer nothing?

A page that answers none of those four is a page selling something. Ours are answered on the money page and the method is described in who paints here.

The free routes

As everywhere else on this site, and for the same reason: none of them pays us anything.

• A library card — Kanopy and hoopla stream free with a card from a participating library. Libraries also hold a great deal of design reference that is expensive to buy. Catalogues vary; check your own library's site.
• OpenLearn, The Open University's free course catalogue.
• YouTube, particularly for software walkthroughs, which date fast and are therefore badly suited to a paid course anyway.

What a creative subscription actually teaches in this subject

Taste, composition and presentation — the things that make a room work and make a scheme legible to someone else. That is genuinely most of what an enthusiastic amateur needs, and it is worth being clear that it is not nothing.

• Colour and material relationships, which transfer to any room you will ever decorate.
• Layout and circulation, the part most people get wrong and the part that costs most to fix afterwards.
• Presenting a scheme — mood boards, sample layouts, plans — which is useful even if the only person you are presenting to is whoever you live with.

What it does not teach is the regulated half of the profession: building codes, technical drawing to a standard, specification and procurement, and working to somebody else's budget and liability. Those are the reason the professional route exists and the reason a certificate of completion is not a substitute for it.

A way to use one that does not waste the year

Interior design is a project subject, so tie the subscription to a project. A year spent browsing a catalogue teaches very little; a year spent doing one room properly teaches a great deal.

1. Pick one room before you subscribe, and a budget for it.
2. Work through material that applies to that room, in order, ignoring everything else in the catalogue.
3. Produce a scheme — board, plan, list — before buying anything physical.
4. Cancel at the end of the project, or set the reminder for eleven months, whichever comes first.

If that project goes well and you want another, buying the specific course outright is usually better than renewing, because the next room might be two years away. Two of the three services here do not sell courses that way; the one that does is covered in our Domestika review.

What to do before you spend anything at all

Measure the room and photograph it in daylight. That costs nothing, takes twenty minutes, and it is the input every course will ask you for in its first lesson — so doing it first means you start the course working rather than watching.

Then look at what your library holds. Design reference is expensive to buy and libraries carry a lot of it, and a card costs nothing and pays this site nothing. If a fortnight with borrowed books and a measured plan does not hold your interest, a year of subscription was never going to.

If it does hold your interest, you will start the course knowing what you want from it, which is the difference between a subscription that gets used and one that renews quietly in the background. The renewal figures for all three are on the money page.

There is one more free step worth taking before any of this, and it is the least glamorous. Walk round the room at three different times of day and note where the light actually falls. Every scheme that fails at home fails on light, and no online course can tell you about yours.

Do those two things — measure, and watch the light — and a course becomes a tool you are using rather than a thing you are consuming. That distinction is worth more than the difference between any two of these subscriptions.

The money page keeps every figure on this site in one place: whether a MasterClass subscription is worth paying for. Prices were read on one day, in a US-configured browser; open the seller’s panel yourself before you agree to anything.