Design Education Has Survived Every Revolution.

It usually starts with one person. Someone joins an info session, sits through the intro, nods politely, then cuts straight through the noise.

“How are you teaching AI?”

Not typography. Not software. Not timetables. AI. You can hear the mix of curiosity and pressure in the question. A quiet fear that if they choose the wrong path now, they’ll lose time they can’t afford to waste.

Fair enough. The design industry is arguing with itself about what “AI literacy” even means. Some studios are rewriting their process on the fly. Others are pretending nothing’s changed. Students are left trying to work out where they fit in all of this.

Thirty years of change has given us a pretty good filter. We’ve watched the industry panic before. The shift from scalpels and spray mount to the first beige Macs. The moment Photoshop landed and half the print world thought the sky was falling. The scramble to make websites before anyone agreed what a website even was. Then the quiet revolution of Figma arriving and resetting the studio playbook.

Every time someone said design was finished. Every time it wasn’t.

Andy Shillington remembers the early fear well. Manual jobs disappearing. People clinging to the old ways because the new tools looked fast and messy and a bit cheap. His choice was simple. Move forward or get left behind. He backed the future. He built a school on the idea that design thinking outlasts any tool. He was right then. Still is now.

The point of learning design isn’t to worship the software. That’s why our students don’t spend months clicking through interfaces like they’re studying for a certificate no one will ever ask for. They’re pushed to think, question, write, sketch, argue, test, break things and rebuild them. Once you can do that, you can pick up any tool and bend it to your will. AI included.

Some briefs now ask students to test AI as part of their process. Not as a shortcut. As something to chew on. Use it to spark ideas, rough out a direction, build references you can’t shoot or source on your own. Then interrogate it. Spot the clichés. Fix the weird hands. Push it until it stops giving you the same three answers the internet gives everyone else.

The work doesn’t come from the prompt. It comes from the decisions afterwards.

That’s the line between a designer and someone waiting for a machine to tell them what they’re allowed to make.

AI can spark something. It can break a block at 2am. It can create an accident you wouldn’t think of on a tired Tuesday. Useful. But left unchecked, it creates the same soup of images everyone else is posting. Students can feel that. They want more. They want their voice back.

The ones who arrive at Shillington usually aren’t looking for a hobby. They want change. They want to feel capable. They want a career they can stand behind. They want the confidence that comes from actually knowing how to think through a brief rather than hoping a tool fills the gap.

And they want to do it fast because life isn’t waiting politely in the corner for them to catch up.

That’s why the course is built the way it is. Accelerated, practical, human. Real briefs. Real deadlines. Real feedback that doesn’t sugar coat anything. The kind of pace that makes people realise they can do more than they’ve been told. Some come in quiet and leave loud. Others come in burnt out and leave with a spark they thought they’d lost somewhere in an office job they never wanted.

AI doesn’t threaten that. It just raises the stakes.

Students learn to treat AI like another material. Not magic, not evil, not the answer to every problem. Clay. Wood. Ink. Code. Images. Words. A thing you shape. A thing you control.

Design has never been safe or still. It moves. It mutates. It keeps pulling in new tools and people who don’t quite fit anywhere else. That’s the part of the industry Shillington has always stood with. The ones who want more. The ones who refuse to wait for permission.

Education isn’t going anywhere. People will always look for ways to grow past the life they were handed. Some will cling to the past. Others will make the future. Progressives lead. Everyone else catches up.

We teach the people who want to lead.

Find out more about what else we teach on our Graphic Design course, and get designer ready.