The Graphic Design Handbook, Reinvented

The team at Shillington are super excited to launch The Guide, our brand new platform that contains all lecture and demo notes from our course, animated technical examples, industry best practices, case studies and loads more.

It’s jam packed with over 20 years of content written by industry experts who are passionate about design and teaching. It’s the the graphic design handbook, reinvented.

Membership

We are super excited to be able to offer membership to The Guide to all our graduates from the past 23 years, as well as all students currently enrolled at Shillington. So, no matter how long ago you studied with us or what course you studied on, you can catch up with all the latest in the industry, the ins and outs of the latest versions of Adobe CC and our updated industry case studies. And, of course, these will continue to evolve and develop as the industry evolves and develops.

Are you a Shillington graduate and are liking the sound of all this? Get in on the action—sign up for a membership today!

The Guide Membership includes:

• 20+ years of graphic design related content created and curated by Shillington’s global team of passionate teachers.
• Exclusive access to the all new Career Guide—packed with industry insight to help you set goals and get your career on to go.
• Relevant content that constantly evolves with the design industry to ensure The Guide remains as up-to-date as possible.
• Fresh design inspiration, case studies and industry examples.
• Searchable, portable, animated content created to support our graduates—wherever they are in the world.

Convinced? Get your membership now.

Print is Dead!

Anyone that has studied at Shillington would remember receiving over 1000 pages of handouts—covering everything from alignment to X-height. They were referred to throughout the course, and even dog-eared, years after graduating. It was no small move to make the decision to stray from a tried and tested system. But, it was 2018 and it seemed archaic to be carrying a folder full of knowledge around on your back and wasteful to still be printing and providing handouts to students. If we were going to make a move, we wanted the system to meet the needs of students, and be better than any other system out there.

The handouts were like a bible and guide when working by yourself so I felt like it was incredibly useful for me personally

Research, Research and More Research

Any designer knows that the best solutions come out of research and defining the problem. The Guide team undertook extensive research into competitor platforms, conducted quantitive and qualitative interviews with graduates and prospective students as part of our research. This revealed some valuable data and insights that guided our decisions to move forward.

Most institutions were providing course notes as PDFs—something that we could have implemented very quickly, but seemed like the easy way out and didn’t solve a lot of the problems outlined in our research. We needed something with fantastic search capabilities, that was responsive on different devices, accessible in different font sizes, had engaging multimedia content and still easy to print.

Building a Team

The decision was made to move forward! Shillington was going to be developing a brand new custom build platform to replace not just our handouts, but our entire student communication eco-system. The job went out to companies large and small. Brisbane-based agency Standing By Co. was eventually selected because of their collaborative design approach, as well as wanting to support an amazing small business in one of our campus cities. A kick-off discovery session was held and the vision for The Guide was born:

A beautifully designed student resource with great user experience at its core

Don’t Be Lazy

The migration of over 1000 pages to a digital platform was never going to be a small feat, but the team at Shillington wanted to set the bar even higher. The team’s motto was “don’t be lazy”—meaning that we wanted to go above and beyond just copying and pasting all that information. We were going to ensure all the content was relevant, inspiring and had amazing new case studies and examples to go with it. If we were going to meet our tight deadlines, we needed to build and migrate the content before the design was completed. A team over 10 of the global Shillington staff worked tirelessly for over 10 weeks to re-imagine all of the handouts into their new digital format.

This re-imagining even resulted in brand new content being developed that has never before been available in the Graphic Design Course, such as Tone of Voice, Visual Identity breakdowns, Visual Language and Designing for Accessibility.

Test Makes Best

After months of development, prototyping and building all of the content, we were finally ready for beta testing. The May 2019 Brisbane full-time class were our guinea pigs and helped us to iron out any issues before we released The Guide to our classes globally in September. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive:

I love The Guide and wish we could have used it sooner

We felt confident to proceed with the release. The agile nature of working with Standing By Co. has meant that since the beta version, The Guide has had two full UX and UI updates and it promises to continue to evolve and improve as it is used by more of our students and graduates.

What the Future Holds

We have big plans for the future of The Guide—and we can’t wait to share them with you. With the launch of memberships, Shillington has developed a brand new Career Guide that is now available, for the first time ever, exclusively to members. We searched far and wide to bring you amazing advice for your career, not just for those entering into the industry for the first time but also for those well into their career.

There’s also plans for The Guide to become our full student interaction platform—hosting forums, quizzes and building the Shillington community.

We’ll be announcing all further updates on The Guide itself and across our platforms so keep an eye out for exciting future developments.

Become a member for just US$10, £10, AU$12 per month (or pay yearly and get 2 months free) and get your hands on all this amazing and continually evolving content today.