Design community ‘slow to boost its skills’

The UK design community is apathetic about boosting its skills, according to research by Design Week and independent research group YouGov.



Only 8 per cent of those questioned say they spend £1000 to £1500 a head per year on training, while 13 per cent say they spend £500 to £1000 a head and 21 per cent say they spend less than £500 a head.



Just over half say they devote between one and eight hours a month to training of any sort.



A total of 836 people responded to the poll, 50 per cent of whom work in UK design consultancies, 25 per cent lead or work on in-house design teams, and 25 per cent are on the client side.



Of the clients polled, 53 say they see generating visual work as the main activity for designers working for them over the next three years, while only 31 per cent say they’ll be looking for designers to give strategic advice on brands or products.



A full breakdown of the results can be seen in Design Week’s Professional Development supplement, which is published with tomorrow’s issue.

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  • trevy November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am

    In my experience within the London Design fraternity I have noticed that many creatives, including senior ones, in the industry are uncertain how to use desk top publishing software correctly. Part of the problem is that the desk top publishing software is constantly changing. Therefore it is hard to keep up to date with what you can do with it. For instance, the introduction of ‘smart objects’ in Adobe software and how to use them has gone somewhat unnoticed by a lot of people i have met. Additionally, there is still a prevalent myth that retouching and visualisation in Photoshop should be done in CMYK colour modes. I think managements should do more themselves to get acquainted with educational literature and be more active in passing on their erudition to other members of their teams. Then maybe designers could acquaint themselves with the Layers Pallet a bit more in Illustrator, organise their files better, and help ease the process at the production cycle.

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