Design courses - advice please!

newbie1010

The company i work for currently pays an outside graphic designer to design our adverts, which i oversee, but they are very poor in terms of creative ideas and are very unreliable and they're not cheap. As a way of saving costs & adding another string to my bow the company has agreed to fund me doing a design course and get whatever software is needed in house so that i can do a lot of the work myself. With the time i take going back and forth with our current designer I think it would also save a huge amount of time.

However i don't have any experience in graphic design so I would really appreciate advice regarding what courses are out there. I'm 25, would consider myself quite creative, did art in school and history of art as part of my degree in college. I think if this were to work out it would save the company a lot of money and if i'm doing the day to day stuff we could also maybe use a bigger design agency for one or two of our bigger jobs during the year.

Anyway, some advice would be much appreciated!! Thanks for reading

Hank_Scorpio

More than likely it will cost the company money in reprints.

But you can go to the likes of IACT, New Horizons etc. and do the introductory courses to illustrator, photoshop and indesign.

Then do the DTP master course they have.

Then buy the software.

By now you're looking at about 6 or 7k spent already and about 6 months gone on the calendar. Where you're still outsourcing work because you haven't really learned design yet.

Then you start making your designs and send them to the printer where they reject the artwork because you've made so many errors in it. So by now they are saying to send the artwork and they'll fix it but they'll charge 50 euro and hour and spend a day or two fixing it and by then it will be about €400 to €800 extra for origination time.

So after about 5 days of you sending it to print you'll hear that it's gone to press and then it will come back and you'll be sorta happy but not really happy because the paperweight is too heavy or too thick, the colours don't match what you expected and it doesn't fold flat and springs open because the stock is all wrong, but with the result and glad that you spend about €10k on learning this (not including the 6 months where you had to get a designer).

So by now you can use the software to a certain degree and you can produce ok designs and layouts but you're spending more of your time designing something say a 6 page dl which should take 2 - 3 days in total from receiving the text to layout to proofing to fixing and sending to print. Instead of this type of turnaround you'll do it in 6 - 7 days and then spend another 5 days at in talks with the printer about making changes so it's suitable to print.

And this is everytime.

So by the end of the year you're after spending €20k on learning, designing and having prepress departments fix your job because you didn't really know what you're doing. Let alone the time it takes for you turnaround a job because you won't be as fast or efficient as a trained graphic designer.

So by now you're into the second year and decide to night courses on printing and designing for print or something similar where you'll fork out another couple of grand learning the basics of printing and colour and RIPs and things like that.

And so on and so and so on.

It will get to the point that all you're doing is design work and not the job you were hired for.

why not put an advert out to hire a graphic designer full time for the company?

There's people out there looking for work and having an in-house graphic designer that knows the job will cost you about €35 - €45k a year.

You'll save yourself a lot of money hiring a graphic designer full-time rather than learning the software and print yourself.

Don't forget all those figures don't include the personal time you have to put in to this and the amount of time that it takes from doing your actual job that you originally hired for.

Hire someone full-time or part-time to do this work for you, or if you have a large project then hire a freelance person on contract.

Pixelcraft

quite a few companies are doing that, and some of the stuff I have to fix before it goes on press is incredible. As hank says, it's not just about having the software, even if you're 'creative' (which almost everyone thinks they are!), even if you produce amazing looking work on screen, there is a huge amount of knowledge needed to get something printed correctly.

You may be underestimating the time needed to create artwork also, but that's something only you guys will know.

Another string to your bow it may be, but if your job comes back from the printers wrong of the artwork, you'll have cost your company money in wages while you were working and the cost to reprint. It's a big big risk seeing as you'll be totally new to graphic design.

If you're not happy with your current designer, just look into changing them.

p

There's very few good short courses in design, and it's a whoel skill in itself. It's hard to tell if you could reproduce anything at the level your require without seeing the work you're currently using. The thing with good design is, that it looks easy, doing it yourself it often another deal altogether.

It might be more cost effective to find a decent freelancer who will charge you a more favourable rate.