A 12-module course on the fundamentals of visual design — composition, type, color, hierarchy, restraint. Built for the PM, engineer, or marketer who wants to read design fluently. Not necessarily make it.
Taken by people who ship at Linnea, Mercury, Vercel & Stripe
Module 02 — where the eye lands first, and how to decide that on purpose.
No software. No Figma. Atelier trains the eye — the thing that decides whether work looks considered or looks cheap — and gives you the vocabulary to say why.
Yuki spent nine years at IDEO building brand and product systems — for companies most people have never heard of, and a few everyone has. She left in 2021 to do the part of the job she actually missed, which turned out not to be the deliverables. It was the teaching.
Atelier is the course she wishes she could have handed every sharp, non-design colleague who ever asked her to "just make the deck look nicer." It is not about tools. There is no Figma in it, on purpose. It is about the eye — and the only reason designers seem to have a sixth sense is that they were taught to look.
She still consults, quietly, a handful of Series-A founders at a time. Which is why every example in every module is real, recent, and occasionally still a little embarrassing.
READING Berger, Ways of Seeing — chapter 1
PROJECT Squint-test five products you trust, and write down what survives
PROJECT Recompose a cluttered settings page, twice
READING Leborg, Visual Grammar — pp. 40–58
PROJECT Rank every element on a real pricing page, 1 to last
PROJECT Annotate five typefaces you already use, by hand
READING Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style — excerpt
PROJECT Set one long article, end to end, defending every choice
PROJECT Fix the type in a real dashboard you find unbearable
PROJECT Build a nine-step neutral ramp that doesn't go muddy
READING Albers, Interaction of Color — plates 1–6
PROJECT Audit a palette against WCAG, then fix it on taste
PROJECT Re-space a landing page until it can breathe
PROJECT Replace three stock photos with better, cheaper calls
PROJECT Critique the motion in an app you love, frame by frame
READING A one-page closing letter from Yuki
PROJECT Redesign your module-1 project — and watch the gap
say they use a lesson from Atelier in a typical work week — a year or more after finishing.
modules the average learner finishes, of 12. Most self-paced courses see closer to three.
learners since the first module shipped — PMs, engineers, marketers, founders.
refund rate across three years — the only number we'll point to about whether it works.
"I used to send 'can we make this nicer?' Slacks and hope. Now I send an annotated screenshot with three specific fixes. My designer told me, unprompted, that reviews got faster."
"Module 4 broke something open. I'd shipped UI for six years without being able to say why a screen felt cheap. Now I can — and I fix it before the designer ever sees the branch."
"Our marketing pages stopped looking like a Notion doc. I didn't hire anyone. I just stopped making the four mistakes Atelier names, by name, in module two."
Atelier is built to be returned to. You will not "finish" it the way you finish a webinar — you'll keep it, the way you keep a good reference book.
Atelier is $399 today. When module 13 — Designing with AI — ships in June, the price becomes $449. Enroll now and every future module stays free for you, forever.
Expensable — we send an itemised invoice in your or your company's name.
Team of 5+? Studio licenses from $1,790 — [email protected]
Yes — that is, precisely, who it's for. Roughly 70% of learners are PMs, engineers, and marketers. The goal is fluency, not a career change: to read design well enough to brief it, critique it, and not get rolled in a review. The other 30% are designers filling gaps, and they're welcome too.
The 12 modules total roughly 58 hours of video and exercises. Self-directed learners average four to six weeks at a few hours a week; plenty take a full year, returning module by module. There are no deadlines and access never expires — so the honest answer is: exactly as long as you want.
Yes — a certificate of completion once you finish all 12 modules and submit the final project. It's nice on a LinkedIn profile and meaningless to anyone who already knows you. The real credential is the work you can suddenly do, and the reviews you stop losing.
Almost always. $399 sits comfortably under most teams' learning-and-development budgets, and we send a proper itemised invoice in your name or your company's. Many employers reimburse Atelier as professional development — at checkout there's a one-paragraph justification you can forward to a manager verbatim.
Yes. Fourteen days, no questions asked, even if you're partway through. We'd genuinely rather you leave cleanly than sit on a course you resent. The under-2% refund rate across three years is the only marketing claim we'll make about whether it lands.
Twelve modules. Lifetime access. One small studio's attempt to teach the most useful skill nobody tells you is learnable.