I had become a bit of a sceptical person after my time at university

Funnily enough, I came across the Creative Design School whilst I was already in a job doing graphic design. My background prior to that job was more inclined towards the Fine Art side of the creative industry, with my degree in Drawing (yes, that is a thing!) from Falmouth University.

JESSICA NOBLE, UK

ADVANCED GRAPHIC DESIGN LEVEL 3 COURSE

I enjoyed traditional drawing and painting from a young age and decided to pursue it at college, but – like many people – I wasn’t entirely sure how I could turn my passion into a career and didn’t quite know what to study at university. Being that it was the closest to what I did in my spare time and what I’d enjoyed most about Fine Art at college, Drawing was the degree I landed on.

During my time at university, we had a course on repeat patterns and how to create them using Photoshop. I quickly fell in love with its capabilities and found that and my work would veer towards involving technology in some shape or form.

Pretty soon I bought an iPad Pro and Procreate and was working almost exclusively digital. I went on to take an additional course in Adobe Illustrator as well, and after university I found myself scouted for a position with the NHS doing both illustration and graphic design work.

Since then, I’ve moved around a bit with jobs to try and find my place in the world and discovered that I enjoy myself the most when design and a smidge of illustration come together in my work. I did, however, feel some imposter syndrome about never having done an actual course or properly studying graphic design as its own field of work. In this respect, I felt like I was lacking something.

I enrolled with Creative Design School to see how I could improve my skills.

I felt like I already had a good grasp of the basics, but that I could definitely use some tips and tricks from someone who knew their stuff. I got all that and more from my one-to-one design coach. Generally, I had become a bit of a sceptical person after my time at university. I had expected it to be this haven of knowledge wherein you would meet your lifetime best friends and my teachers would whisper to me all the secrets of my field and that this would justify the tens of thousands that it required to be there in the first place. This did not happen. In fact, it was a huge disappointment to find that I was actively discouraged from thinking about how my practice could be applied practically in the workplace after university. As a result, I was let down by the system and felt like I hadn’t really learned much of anything at all by the end of it, much less that I had been prepared for the future.

My journey so far.

I’m just over halfway into my course and I’ve learned so much more than I ever did at university. I cannot stress enough how entirely my workflow and methods have changed since taking this course. The units are thorough and precise without feeling unapproachable or impossible to understand. It helped as well that either Pete has a sixth sense for discerning when I’m not sure about something, or I am terrible at masking my confusion because he literally would not let me get off the call until he was sure I was certain about which direction I was headed in next. Anything I was confused about or didn’t totally feel sure of, we would work through together in a way that made sense and helped me to actually learn something about the field I was passionate about working in.

Prior to the CDS course, I would go about projects in a sort of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey kind of way – hoping to sort of get somewhere close to my work being ‘good’ by the end of it but also not feeling as though I had any real way of gauging it’s ‘goodness’ anyway. Now, I know exactly what steps I need to take in order to figure out what I’m going to do for each and every project. There is no longer any guesswork and I feel confident in the work that I create for the first time.

As someone who was let go just before COVID and remained in retail for the entirety of it just to make ends meet, it is huge for me to be able to feel like I have some semblance of satisfaction in the skills that I’ve worked hard to build. I hit some real lows during the earlier units of my course (due to difficulty with previous positions and also for personal reasons) but Pete was able to remind me that I was capable and had all the tools that I needed to succeed. The only person holding me back was me, and as soon as I realised that, things got so much easier. At the moment, I’m currently juggling both full-time design work with freelance design work and I’m loving it. I feel better than I have ever before about the work that I do, and I feel as though the future only holds more opportunities to learn and grow. The course is serving as my own little side project that I can pour my heart into (as and when I have the time!) and I hold only excitement for it.

I’m in the midst of designing my own website so it’s not finished yet (be kind!) but you can find that here:

https://www.jessicakatedesign.com

For more up-to-date info and work, follow my Instagram @jessicakate_design