Are short graphic design courses really able to teach you how to be a graphic designer?

Absolutely not, any qualified graphic design graduate would be highly offended if you even contemplated to be on their level, there is a big difference between 2 days Photoshop/InDesign training and 3 years hard graft on a degree!

However short courses do have a value…

We regularly train people who either run small business or work in marketing departments. Some people already have a brand identity, some just have a simple logo.

What they all have in common is they know their businesses and Brand values inside out, they know exactly what they want to achieve, even what colours to use and what text and images are to be included in their newsletter, advertisement or poster.

These are the people who will gain a lot out of a short graphic design course, they just need to grasp how to use the tools that will help them facilitate their design work without the hassle of going back and forth to a fully qualified graphic designer.

So how much can you learn in 2 days?

Just last week I had a young lady on a two day graphic design course in Derby who worked for a small tool manufacturing company, she was clearly a young fresh employee helping to bring the established traditional company she worked for up to date with their advertising communications. Having already attended short courses in SEO and social marketing to bring their web presence up to date, she now wanted to turn her hand to some printed publicity material. She arrived on the first day of the InDesign course armed with a memory stick full of images, logos and text. She left after two days having produced a new double page leaflet, a full set of stationary and a quarter page advertisement all ready to go to press!

She emailed me yesterday to keep me up to date with her progress and told me that the most valuable thing she came a way with was the confidence to sit down and thrash some layouts around whenever she had an idea come in to her head.

This is a classic example of how a short graphic design course can help businesses, admittedly you wont be able to jump in to a professional graphic design studio and work on a variety of campaigns but who says you cant save some of the cost and hassle from out sourcing all your graphic design work?

More information on our 2 day InDesign course can be found here

More information about Adobe products can be found here