When I first asked Erin Cooper to speak at Confluence, she told me that they had a design workshop for small businesses in the pipeline for early 2014.
Well, now that time has come.
The Cooperhouse Creative Workshop website just launched, and if you needed any more proof that Cooper House know what they’re talking about, this beautiful, functional website should do the trick.
The Cooper House Creative workshop aims to teach bloggers, online shops and small business owners how to turn great design from an expensive luxury into a readily available resource. All you need is a laptop (preferably a Mac), a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, and two days with an open mind.
The workshop is limited to 12 students (half the tickets have already sold at time of writing), the price is $509.95 (including processing), and it runs Friday and Saturday the 7th and 8th of February (checkout the agenda). The venue is the new green room at Green Bambino.
With such small class-sizes I’m sure it will be very hands-on, and could save you a small fortune in design fees in the long-run.
So I asked Erin:
Why are you putting on these workshops?
“At CooperHouse, we work primarily with small businesses and we feel that this unique demographic is often at a disadvantage when it comes to creating long-term visual content for their websites & social media feeds.
When a small business invests in a website & a brand, they may not always have the funds to hire a designer long term to help reinforce the brand. Lots of businesses DIY their design for promotions, and we believe that teaching them the right way to design, and giving them the tools they need will help eliminate poor layouts, ineffective visuals, and embarrassing mistakes. Learning to be a professional graphic designer does take years and years, but the fundamentals necessary to learn basic promotional design using Photoshop & Illustrator can be taught in a workshop, especially if the student is diligent with practice.
Ultimately, our goal is to reach out to our community and offer something that could have an immediate effect on the success of these small businesses, and empower non-designers to create visual messages that are effective & help elevate their brand.”
My thoughts:
I think it sounds very useful, and good value too for such a small class size. Cooperhouse have created some amazing websites, raving fans, and know how to make complicated processes easy to understand (check out their Confluence talk on Blog Design Strategy). This workshop gets the Confluence seal of approval.
You can register here.
