£7000! Anyone want to come to my house for 3 day intensive course...only £700!
standard rates for design from a professional studio are around £300 to £400 per day, so if you are a pro designer on the same level as the teachers at Shillington don't you think you are selling yourself a bit cheap there? You'd be better of just sticking to the day job, presuming you are a professional designer.
I've heard they're intense courses in basic design and focussing more on software skills, effectively giving you the 'qualification' you need to sit at a Mac working up other's work for the rest of your life. Anyone know if this is the case?
It's more the other way around. They will teach you the basics of operating the software and a mac, and how to do some specific, useful advanced tasks but really 3 months is too short a time to become an expert in the main 3 Adobe programs and fit in any other learning. They teach you how to be a real world designer, an appreciation of a wide array of design and bring you up to speed on the tips, tricks and observations real designers have learnt in their careers. Not everyone who takes the course is cut out to be a designer, not everyone who does a degree comes out of it being a good designer, you either have that spark or you don't. If you have it then Shillington will open your eyes to how to wield it in a professional manner. If you don't have it then no amount of teaching is going to make you a good designer. Same with art, music etc.
Buddy I went there because I was looking for a carrier change. basically the are very good advertising themselves . Do u really think that u can learn indesign,photoshop,illustrator in 3 months . no way !!!
we mainly worked in indesign , we did the pen tool in illustrator and graphic chart . photoshop almost nothing i had to take another course to learn it properly after spending 7000. finally Acrobat was hilarious , basically we didnt do anything , we learned how to press the OK button to save it as pdf ...save your maney or give it to me i can teach you more things
professional designers mainly work in InDesign. You are not being truthful about what you were taught in Photoshop and Illustrator. They showed you many techniques and tools within both bits of software. I understand where you went wrong and why you are frustrated by it, you thought you were going to the class Paul here describes. theyre teaching you how to be a designer, not a software operator. All the basic and a fair amount of intermediate and advanced use of the software was shown, if you couldn't pick it up in 3 months then fair play, it's a lot to take in. I would question though why you chose to take a higher education course in graphic design when you don't even know how to use the basics of photoshop. Thats like someone turning up to a degree level Illustration class then complaining they didn't teach you how to use a pencil. I got photoshop free with a scanner in the mid 90s when I was about 14/15 years old. I taught myself how to use it over time, thats because I am an artistic minded person and I enjoy this. You wouldn't take a degree level course in music having never played an instrument in your life, did you just decide you wanted to be a designer out of the blue 5 minutes before you booked the course? If it has been a goal of yours and something you are passionate about to the point where you want to spend thousands of £ on a course don't you think you should have actually tried digital art software? You should be living in it.
I went to this college (Liverpool St one) in 2009 having used photoshop for about 13 years, I don't think you need that much experience in photoshop, maybe a few months teaching yourself at home with Youtube vids. I learnt Photoshop when I was a kid in that time with no internet, no youtube, no forums etc, a 486pc with 4 meg ram, it's not that hard. When I went there I had never used InDesign or Illustrator before, by the time I left I could use those 2 bits of software as well as or better than any Designer I have met since, even seniors, having worked in quite a few places with a lot of degree educated designers. You don't need to know all the software, a basic understanding of Photoshop that anyone can teach themselves in a few months is enough to go there and come out knowing as much as the average jnr designer getting paid for their work. I left there 3 years ago, I'm a middleweight designer now, all I knew was photoshop and how to make really bad grungy flyers when I went in and now I can design anything from a logo to a 300 page brochure without even touching photoshop.
Personally I wouldn't feel happy doing a course like that since there doesn't seem to be any time spent developing an idea or trying something new. She showed me some logo ideas in her sketchbook for a project she'd just finished and they all revolved around the same basic idea.
I understand what you are saying, and theres some truth in that, but at the same time how long do you spend on logos now? As I said before most rates are around £350 a day, how many clients come to you with £7000 in their pocket to pay you for a month working on their logo? Most small businesses, which is what most designers deal with, only have enough money in their budget to pay you for 2 days work. Ok, we know in actuality you end up spending more than 2 days on it, working 60 to 70 hour weeks dealing with all the tweaks and amendments back and forth etc, but thats what theyre paying you for and its a hard reality of real life design that a lot of uni student shave to get to grips with on the job as an intern for many, many months. You don't have 6 months to do 1 design, you don't need 6 months and no one is going to pay you those sort of sums unless you are rebranding Apple or the Olympics. They want you to produce 3 separate ideas for the logo projects, thats not always possible, creativity can be nurtured but not directly taught like maths, what matters is that you learn from that sort of time pressure in a relaxed and friendly environment and that in the end you come out with 1 really good idea you can stick in a portfolio and show a potential employer, they will know that when they add that to the 1 good idea they had and another good idea one of their middleweights had that you can contribute to sending 3 strong ideas to a client, and its not going to take you months to come up with it.
Ive worked with people who have masters desgrees in design and come to us as interns not even understanding the basics of making a design with bleeds and margins that can be safely printed, not understanding master pages in InDesign or how to even do basic tasks in Photoshop. With any course you get out what you put in, if you really want this then do yourself a favour before you sign up to any course, be it uni, Shillington, whatever, open up Photoshop, start there, play around, learn it, watch some tutorials. You will be spending 60 hours a week in one of these programs for the next 40 years of your life, give it some time, get your head around the basics, if this is something you still really want to do with your life then go look at some courses, and don't be put of Shillington by what scatola said, hes perfectly entitled to his opinion and it obviously wasn't the right course for him at that time, but when I took it there were about 20/30 of us in the class and I can safely say 95% of those people came out with the skills and drive to start a design career and were more than happy with the course. I've had contact with 3 of them since and they are now professional designers working in a range of places.