Student support 

[MUSIC PLAYING] - I think for the most part, it's just massively improved my confidence because a lot of the time when I was working as a designer in the past, it was always as the only designer or one of the only designers in the company that I would be working at.

So the opportunities to just exchange ideas with other creative people has been such a relief. And yeah. It's improved my confidence massively. This course without exaggeration has changed my life and no one paid me to say that.

It's completely turned everything I've known about graphic design upside down and it's just made me look and approach design in a completely different way. So I feel like I've come onto this course with a junior designer mentality. And I'm leaving with definitely at least a mid or senior level designer mentality. I feel confident enough to go for those roles now.

- So I find that really helpful because it's all the information for the course that is released on a Friday afternoon. So then you can look at it over the weekend and decide what you need to prioritize and how you're going to manage your work well for that week.

So I find that quite helpful because it gives me the weekend to think, OK, well, on Wednesday and whatever, I'm going to need to do some drawing.

- I just mentioned earlier that I've trained myself, self-taught designer. Why that I know how to use Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and then the Creative Suite. But what they are actually teaching us here is sometimes to come away from the computer and then create things in real life.

So if you are, let's say, your hobby is to make pottery or you like creating ceramics or you like working with wood or I don't know, collage or paints, you can actually create the object and things in the real life first and then digitalize it. And then that actually creates some more interesting effects and more authentic pieces of art, source of arts works.

So the skills, you don't need to be a computer genius or you don't need to be a pro on all the Adobe Creative Suite. I have many of my fellow students who just started using InDesign for the first time on this course.

So I think to be honest, it's really open. So you don't-- all you need is probably just the motivation and the hunger or to create things that are interesting.

- People on this course have such a varied number of different backgrounds. They have different strengths. They all bring something different to the table. Some people on this course come from an animation background. Some people come from a photography background. And everyone does different stuff for a living. Some people work in design. Some people don't.

And so it's such a varied mix of people and the challenges are open enough that you can take it in whatever direction that you want. So you can use these challenges as an opportunity to experiment.

And I think it's a safe place to fail. I think it's a misnomer that everything has to be perfect on this course. It really doesn't and there have been some projects that have gone horribly for me. But that's fine. And it doesn't-- also, you're not being pleased with the project doesn't mean that you get a bad mark either.

I think as long as you recognize where you went wrong, then that contributes to the mark if you learn from it. So yeah. Also, one of the main things I was worried about when I came onto the course was that I wasn't going to be as good as everyone else. And I quickly realized that was-- I didn't need to worry about anything.

It's given me the space to push myself into other areas that interest me. And also, it's given me the space to figure out what I like and what I don't like in graphic design. So I realized that I really enjoy UI/UX design. And yeah. I think it was through doing these challenges that it's given me the confidence to realize that.

- But also, in terms of being able to investigate things and make decisions about where you want your practice to go and you definitely get more of a steer in the first module in terms of what more input and that kind of thing. But really, it's about what you want to do and how you make the most of this course.

So I would say self-motivation is really important. And obviously, it's academic as well. And I wouldn't want to under play the academic side of it. It isn't just a practical course even illustration. People come on to illustration a little bit sometimes thinking that it's just going to be drawing. It's just going to be entirely practical and it isn't. It's academic and a lot of the references relate to other areas such as philosophy, psychology, and different aspects of influence on illustration as well.

So I think if you're open minded and self-driven, then you'll do really well on this course. And it's really great to have that support to be able to do what you want to do, not be too directly.