This course introduces the students to various design aspects of digital systems, and train them to deal with the existing tradeoffs, by influencing their designs to meet the target use-cases. Visual content is one of the most demanded (and demanding) types of data that need to be captured, transmitted, processed, and/or analyzed to allow for a smart interconnected world. Hence, without the loss of generality, digital video codec system(s) are chosen to be the case-study to explain the concepts that are delivered throughout the course. The students will be introduced to the multi-dimensional design aspects of such a digital system, and will learn how technology leaders seek compromises between various important parameters such as throughput, power consumption, cost, programmability, time to market, as well as application-specific aspects such as quality, target bitrate, latency, and error resiliency. They will be trained to model different algorithms and analyze the gains/losses of various tradeoffs before kicking off the implementation process. The course is intended to be self-contained, hence, reasonable preparation for most of the topics is provided. The lectures are designed to increase interactivity with the students, providing them with the opportunity to express their thoughts, and to interrupt and ask questions.