Birmingham, UK
online
5 courses available
We're a small team of designers and developers based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. Been running since 2023. Most of us came from agency work — the kind where you ship three websites a week and learn to cut corners you shouldn't. So we started teaching the parts nobody taught us: proper layout thinking, type pairing that doesn't fall apart on mobile, CSS that a colleague can actually read six months later.
Our courses aren't recorded lectures with a quiz at the end. You'll build things, break them, get feedback from people who still do client work on Fridays.
more about uswhat we teach right now
Grid systems, spacing scales, responsive breakpoints. You'll rebuild three real client pages from scratch — no templates, no drag-and-drop.
Picking fonts is the easy part. Making them work together across weights, sizes, and screen densities — that's the actual job. Four weeks of hands-on pairing exercises.
Designers hand you a Figma file. Now what? This one covers the messy middle: inspecting specs, writing CSS that matches the mockup, dealing with assets, and talking to developers without losing your mind.
Not just media queries. We'll go through container queries, fluid type, clamp(), and real-world patterns from sites that get 50k+ daily visitors. You'll test on actual devices, not just Chrome DevTools.
Most design portfolios look the same. We'll help you put together something a hiring manager actually remembers — case studies with context, not just pretty screenshots. Includes two rounds of 1-on-1 review.
honestly, we just got tired of bad courses
8 people max per cohort. If you're stuck, someone notices within the hour — not three weeks later when grades come out.
Everyone who teaches here still takes on client projects. Last month's real brief becomes this week's classroom exercise.
You'll spend 70% of course time writing actual code or pushing pixels. The theory is there, but it's baked into the exercises.
We won't tell you your work is great when it isn't. Blunt critiques now save you from client rejections later. That's the deal.
Between us, we've shipped work for Jaguar Land Rover, BBC Creative, and a handful of Birmingham startups you've probably never heard of (that's fine — they pay well). Two of our tutors have spoken at Config. One refuses to use anything except vanilla CSS and we let her because her students keep winning awards.
We're not a faceless education company. We're seven people who argue about kerning at lunch.
meet the team
Not sure which course fits? Want to talk pricing for your team? Drop us a line and we'll get back to you within a working day. No chatbot, no autoresponder — an actual person reads it.
get in touchDepends on the course. Layout Fundamentals and Typography assume zero coding background. Figma to Production Code expects you to know basic HTML and CSS — if you can write a div and style it, you're fine. Responsive Patterns is intermediate.
Live sessions twice a week, usually Tuesday and Thursday evenings UK time. We record everything and share it next morning, so if you miss one it's not the end of the world. But the live crits are where you get the most out of it.
Yes. Two or three monthly payments, depending on the course length. No interest, no credit check. We split it manually — just email us and we sort it out.
A browser, VS Code (free), and Figma (free plan works). Some courses use Chrome DevTools heavily. That's it. We deliberately avoid tools with expensive subscriptions.
Full refund within the first week if it's not working out, no questions asked. After that, we'll prorate based on sessions completed. Details are in our return policy.
actual students, not actors
Hannah Cole
Junior Designer at Mixd
I'd done two online courses before this and barely finished either. The difference here is someone actually looks at your work and tells you what's wrong. I landed my first agency role three weeks after finishing Layout Fundamentals.
James Okoro
Freelance Web Designer
The typography course changed how I think about type entirely. I used to just pick two Google Fonts and hope for the best. Now I actually understand scale ratios, and clients notice the difference — I've raised my rates twice since.
Priya Nair
UX Engineer at Bloom & Wild
I signed up for the Figma-to-Code course because I kept annoying developers with impractical designs. Turns out the gap between design and code is smaller than I thought — you just need someone to show you where the edges are.
Tom Wu
Career Switcher
Came from accounting. No design background at all. The portfolio course gave me something I could actually send to people without cringing. Marcus spent 40 minutes on my case study layout alone. That kind of attention you don't get elsewhere.
