About Us

We demystify the world of design

More specifically, we teach and mentor marketers and entrepreneurs how to design using professional programs like InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. Mostly via online courses, webinars and 1-1 Zoom sessions. But we also offer small group teaching, and in the past we’ve written and published books. 

Who’s behind it?

Designtuitive is founded by Peter Bone, a graphic, web and motion designer from Cambridge in the UK. Alongside his design work, Peter is one of the UK’s most experienced creative software trainers, who for 25 years has taught thousands of professionals in classrooms in London how to use programs like Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and (previously) Quark Xpress. He started Designtuitive in 2011 because he noticed something strange happening in the world of design… 

Design has changed

Before 2010, 95% of the people Peter taught were already design professionals. Mostly male designers with art school backgrounds, they came on his courses to learn niche Photoshop skills or to get up to speed with the latest version of Illustrator or InDesign. But the combination of the 2008 economic crash and the advent of social media disrupted the world of design, and opened it up for everyone. Now a typical classroom student is female, has no design background, and is most likely a marketer. Whilst they need to develop the very same skills that professional designers do, they come from a very different starting point. 

Why we do what we do

Designtuitive started with this aim in mind – to engage students with no design background and help them learn the professional skills they need. Because in the past few years marketers (and many others) have needed to develop fluency with programs like InDesign and Illustrator to thrive in their careers. 

How we got started

Our first venture was a series of printed books on creating logos [which were beautiful but too niche – we still have boxes of them]. We then figured out how to make them work on the newly emerging Kindle and iPad devices [very fiddly but less costly]. Sticking with digital and print-on-demand formats we wrote InDesign Creative Classroom [way more work than we imagined] and then decided that books were perhaps not for us after all. 

What we do now

Since then, broadband speeds, Vimeo, Squarespace, Zoom and most recently a global pandemic have changed the way that we (and everybody else) looks at online learning, so here we are. 

How we can help you

So if you want to feel more comfortable in the world of graphic design, we’ll do our very best to help. The design world can feel pretty closed to newcomers, but we like to do what we can to open things up. 

So whether you want to either learn InDesign very fast, or take it more slowly and learn the whole range of design programs, we can help with our unique courses. If you’d like to be mentored, to have some human feedback on the skills you’re trying to get under your belt or the work you’re trying to do, we can help. Or if you’re really keen to create logos, and want to learn from a ten year old book, obviously we can help with that as well. 

What others say

To get a sense of the hundreds of clients we’ve worked with as trainers or consultants, click here. Click here if you’d like to read some recent testimonials from students of our online courses or classroom courses.