Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics vs Typography and Branding: Design an Iconic Logo

Four focused modules move from point of view and song form through prosody (matching lyric to music), rhyme types — perfect, family, assonance and consonance — and rhythm. The object-writing exercise is the standout that Berklee graduates like Gillian Welch credit as the single most valuable thing they took away. Reviewers repeatedly say it taught them more than books or workshops; capped only because it is lyric-focused and assumes you already make music elsewhere.

Pat Pattison is a Berklee professor of 40-plus years, author of Writing Better Lyrics and Songwriting Without Boundaries, and former teacher of John Mayer and Gillian Welch. His Coursera instructor rating is 4.8 from 184 ratings. Learners describe him as a gifted, passionate teacher whose examples make abstract ideas click — the most consistently praised element of the whole course.

Free to audit the full video curriculum; a certificate, graded assignments and peer review require paid enrollment or a Coursera Plus subscription. Reddit's consensus is that the free audit alone delivers most of the value, since you can do the exercises yourself and skip the certificate gate. Hard to beat for a Berklee-grade course.

Assignments are real lyric-writing tasks graded by peer review, which is pedagogically sound but operationally the weakest part. Multiple learners hit an upgrade wall at the first assessment, and the quality of peer feedback swings from genuinely useful to abusive or absent. The exercises themselves are excellent; the grading machinery around them is not.

The tools transfer directly to any genre — songwriters from hip-hop to country report applying object writing, rhyme families and structure to their own work. It will not teach you melody, production or an instrument, so it is one strong piece of a larger toolkit rather than a complete songwriting education.

With 26 lessons and over 5 hours of content, the curriculum covers the full logo design pipeline from mood boards and hand sketches through Illustrator vectorisation and real-world applications. Learners consistently describe it as "very complete" and praise the depth of the typography section. The main weakness noted is that the course concentrates on a single serif-heavy style, leaving learners who want variety in sans-serif or modern logo types wanting more.

Quique Ollervides brings credentials from Google, Apple, Nike, MTV Latinoamérica, and Cartoon Network, and this shows in the quality of industry references and real project examples he provides. Reviewers frequently highlight his clear explanations, methodical approach, and the way he motivates students to keep advancing. The only friction point is that the original language is Spanish; English voice-over quality has been criticised by a minority of reviewers.

At typical Domestika sale pricing the course represents strong value given the instructor's calibre and the breadth of downloadable resources (15 files including templates and references). Lifetime access is included. A handful of reviewers who purchased at full price or experienced subscription billing issues rated value lower, though the course content itself is consistently described as "worth every penny" by the majority.

The final project — designing a complete iconic logo from brief to finished vector artwork — is well-structured and mirrors a real client workflow. Students post their completed logotypes in the projects gallery, which boasts thousands of entries demonstrating genuine skill development. Some learners felt the project brief was narrowly defined around a specific brand archetype, limiting creative exploration.

Ollervides draws directly on his professional practice throughout the course, referencing real brand projects and explaining the decisions a working designer makes at each stage. Multiple reviewers noted they applied skills directly to client work upon completion. The Illustrator-heavy workflow is industry standard for logo design, making the toolset immediately transferable.