Pro Member Case Studies

My favourite brief I worked on was the book cover. I am rarely sure of my final decisions in creative work, but in the case of the book, by the time I had rejected 4 options, which I had already worked on for 2 days, the final idea seemed to me an ideal option for many hours of choice efforts. In the process of working on portfolio, I constantly replace old works with more perfect ones, but I will not touch the cover of the book for a long time.

I am very satisfied with my experience in Yes I'm A Designer. This is my first online learning experience with interactive elements. Over the past 5 years I have attended 2 different offline course design. And despite the fact that I physically was more present on lessons in terms of quantity and intensity, in Yes I'm A Designer I received more constructive feedback on my work, as well as more works that I can leave in my portfolio.

My advice is to adjust your balance between theory and practice. I know from myself that, if I work on a layout for a long time, I can fall out of the dynamics of learning very quickly. At the same time, if I watch a lot of classes without fixing them with practice, the efficiency of learning slows down noticeably.

The briefs are always very fun and challenging. If I had to choose one, I think the Gin Label Design was probably my favorite.

After going through the brief, I always jump into research first. In this case, I read about the Mexican culture, the people and their festivals, food, etc. While searching, I found out more about their Día de Muertos (the day of the dead) festival. Mexicans view it not as a day of sadness, but as a day of celebration because their loved ones awaken, and celebrate with them. I thought it’d make an interesting festive gin packaging design, and decided to use it as my design inspiration for the brief. After studying the forms and patterns associated with the culture and festival, I created several different sketches for the same. Once the sketch was finalized, I created the artwork in Adobe Illustrator and chose a color scheme to match the aesthetic.

I was already following the Yes I’m A Designer Youtube channel. I had learned a lot from it and liked the way Martin explained and simplified all the topics. I found out about the Pro membership from those videos and decided to join.

I can say for sure that it was a great decision on my part. It feels as though I have joined and become a part of a creative community, and an engaged interactive classroom. Each and every course is very well designed and explained. I love the live review sessions where Martin goes through student submissions and reviews them. The feedback from those sessions has helped me a lot personally. Shumi is the support system of Yes I’m A Designer. She is quick to answer any queries, and I’m really grateful for her constant support.

I’d tell them to try and create designs for as many briefs as possible, and do not hesitate to ask for feedback or support while working on them.

Martin is one of the best lecturers I’ve listened to. I originally studied the Illustrator course on Udemy, and I was so impressed at how clear the video lessons were, that I eventually searched for other YES content. As I was hungry to become a professional graphic designer, I planned on becoming a Pro member so I could have access to more video lessons, but especially access to feedback.

I can’t give a completely fair comparison between my university experience and my experience with YES, as I’ve learned from my university mistakes to help me learn better in the future (engage with the course and ask for support when needed). I feel like YES’ membership is much more dependent on personal input. It requires more personal effort to engage with the briefs, the community and the tutors. A degree has the carrot of a degree at the end of the course. YES’ course’s carrot is whatever the learner wishes to make it. My personal goal is employment/reliable freelance in the creative/arts industry.

As someone who’s studied other subjects online, the interactivity with the course runners is a great help. They’re not just abstract tutors who grade work and exist solely to dispense % of a qualification. The accessibility of the people at YES makes for a better learning experience, as a learner can ask questions to help them understand concepts or briefs better. It helps make learning more inclusive. For example, I have an online certificate in TEFL. But due to how little tutor contact I had, I’m left unsure how competent I truly am with the subject. I know I’m qualified, but I don’t know how capable I actually am. Having fewer barriers and more opportunities for feedback lets me have a more quantified impression of my ability. And that is helpful and reassuring.

I feel like YES has been a lot more helpful with regards to careers compared to my degree. There are briefs and PDFs tailored for employability. My degree offered talks by various people on their personal career path. It was not necessarily helpful as their experiences would have included unseen circumstances, specific geography and specific neurology. YES’ resources are more universally helpful and grounded.

The more you put into the course, the more you will get out of it. The course is richly rewarding when you engage with it. Engage with the Facebook group. Turn up to the webinars if you’re able to. These things will help make the course more enjoyable and it’s cool to have a community of different creatives discussing design and making.

Yes. However, for a while, I did wrestle with the insecurity that I might lack skills that I missed out on because I didn’t have a degree in illustration or graphic design. Skills such as work presentation, portfolio building or workflow structures. But those are skills I have been slowly improving on through completing various briefs; including briefs which are outside of my career path comfort zone. In time I saw my educational background as something which made me unique. As a designer, I feel very confident. The area I still need to improve on is portfolio organisation and job hunting.

The Yes, I’m a Designer courses are programs that teach an all encompassing approach to design and illustration.  The courses are created to give you an in-depth knowledge of the programs needed to succeed in design, illustration, and media production. Once completed you will have enough knowledge to take the certification exams from Adobe.  Along with those courses are others designed to enhance your portfolio and give you the background to land a job in the real world.

The advice I would give would be to start with the 365 Days a Designer as it gives you an all around feel for the things you will be learning in the more in-depth classes.  Also, I would take advantages of all the tools that come with the Creative Cloud subscription like the Adobe Fonts and Adobe Color.  The last piece of advice would be to soak up all the information provided and pay attention to the what is being taught.  There is a lot of great information on the theory of design provided in 365 Days of Design and it helps to really hone the craft.

Well, I’m not there quite yet as I’ve only finished the Illustrator Masterclass and currently on the InDesign Masterclass, but I am more confident now then I’ve ever been in working with these programs.  In the past I have played around with Illustrator but never fully grasped the full extent of what the program was capable of doing until taking the course and I never knew much about InDesign but feel I’m picking it up faster than I would on my own.

I actually stumbled upon YID on YouTube and I was really impressed how Martin taught, the clarity and speed he took us through was quite good. Made the subject matter easy to understand and gave his inputs too. I remember checking the website afterwards and found it to be affordable, one of the great things that factored in is that Martin himself would review our work, so that was another chance in learning.

It was actually excellent. When I had a college assignment and I was like oh there’s a course I could check in YID for that. So whenever I wanted to delve deeper into certain areas I was able to find a lot of what I needed in the different courses Martin had to offer. The live reviews are great too, where we could interact with Martin and the feedback we receive. Other students also gave their input at the same time, so we all could grow together in that sense.

The best thing to do is plan and set deadlines. It was a bit tough for me to balance my class and extra activities, but once I started to plan and allocate a time for it- things got much easier. So maybe aim to finish 5 per month and choose them ahead so that we don’t have to waste time when we are actually going to work on it. It’s all a matter of trial and error, so we can experiment and see what works best for us 🙂

Your Pro Membership was very useful to me because in contrast with traditional education it was more practical and evident, I was able to apply what I learned immediately. On the other hand your courses are more people-oriented, at the same time the atmosphere is very good and gives a lot of motivation to learn.

If they follow the assignment system and course flow they could solve these assignments without any additional problems and at the end of the day they will have a killer portfolio that stands out in the labour market.Anyway don't be afraid to combine the different styles and learned techniques, because you will always get a nice and constructive feedback from Yes I m a designer team or even from the facebook group.

My answer is absolutely YES! When I started your courses I did not know the theoretical part very well and my Adobe skills were low too. Now I am a Top Rated freelancer on UpWork and work as a freelance graphic designer.Anyway I have to mention I almost learned everything from your YouTube channel, Pro member courses and web page. I know I have to learn a lot to be a good designer, but your courses were the basis of my career.