Southern Regional College in Graphic Design: My Own Experience

My personal experience of Southern Regional College were I completed the BTEC National Diploma in Graphic Design and other art and design courses.

I completed the BTEC National Diploma in Graphic Design at the Southern Regional College, Lurgan campus, from 1993 to 1995, so quite a while ago. I started the BTEC National Diploma in Art and Design at Lurgan Campus, then known as the Upper Bann Institute of Further and Higher Education, but switched over to the graphic design course after about two or three weeks. I actually started the course in 1991 with Marcus Benson, and I left the course about one month later. I don't believe that at the time there was much difference in the two courses, as there were hardly any computers used for graphics or art and design, unlike now, as it was very art-based, which obviously is not a reflection of real-world practices and is completely out of touch. I think that at the time, Apple Mac computers were quite expensive, and the prices now are very affordable.

While here, there were subjects like, obviously, graphic design, French (not sure why this was in the course, as it was next to useless and nonsense), history, business studies and photography, amongst others. Photography was film in those days, not digital, so I am showing my age now, haha. I didn't like film photography at all. While here, we worked on assignments per term, including advertising campaigns. One of the teachers was Sean White from Portadown, who ran the course. Here, one of the teachers was renowned photographer Victor Sloan. Going back further, I completed a BTEC First Diploma in Art and Design at the Lurgan campus from 1989 to 1990. There was a broad range of subjects in the course, including drawing and art, graphic design, textiles, pottery, metalwork and woodwork. There was very little graphic design on the Mac computers then. I believe these types of courses have moved to Banbridge and other towns and spread out more nowadays, rather than just Lurgan. While I was there, the local education authority paid for the course, and I think I claimed back travel via the bus to Lurgan and back to Portadown at the end of the year. I also completed the RSA in Desktop Publishing (DTP) at Portadown Campus.

My Own Thoughts as a Graphic Designer

Unfortunately, none of these courses was adequate or very good at equipping a professional graphic designer in the real world. You don’t start learning until you actually start working, I’m afraid, as you’ll learn more in two months working than in education in two years! I can’t see how a job placement would help. I did a job placement in 1994 and stayed about three days instead of two weeks, as it was all paste-up work and almost going back to the Middle Ages in some way, lol. You're just going to be working on things that mean nothing. A business simply doesn’t have the time to train or teach you. I remember when I completed the National Diploma their was a new HND course just started, so I was thinking about this before applying for the Art College in Belfast. The HND looked pretty much the same as the National Diploma, and I could see very little difference. You’d be tied to classes every minute of the day. Want to reach out to me? Comment below.