The Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization: A Founder's Story
The Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization: A Founder's Story
People ask me all the time how the Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization came to be, and the honest answer is that it came from my whole life, not just one moment. So let me tell you the story the way I would tell it if you were sitting across from me with a sketchbook open between us.
A Name Built on Builders
Let me start with the name, because the name carries everything I want this school to be. Bertrand is my maiden name, my family name, and it is a name full of engineers and builders. It is the name of people who made things, who looked at an empty space and saw what could stand there. Williams is my married name, the one I chose to keep. When I put the two together, it just fit, and it felt like the right way to offer something honorable, a school that teaches interior designers how to create again by hand. The name itself is a blend of old and new, family and future, and that is exactly the spirit I wanted at the heart of all of this.
What My Design Education Gave Me
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters for the story.
Design school gave me a real foundation. I hold a bachelor of science and a master of science with an emphasis in interior design, both from an accredited program, which means I am eligible to sit for the NCIDQ if I ever choose to. Every skill I used across my commercial interior design career, I built in those classrooms under professors who took their work seriously. I took my education seriously too, and I never stopped being grateful for it.
In fact, it meant so much to me that years after I graduated, I came back and taught in those same rooms where I had once been a student. I got to teach interior design to a new generation of designers, and that full circle is something I will carry with me always.
What design school did not give me was the freedom to make art. The mediums, the confidence, the joy of a line that lands exactly where you intended it, that came later, on my own. And that gap is exactly where this school was born.
When Architectural Illustration Started Calling
And then, after all of that, art started calling me. Not just any art, but architectural illustration, which is my true love, and the calling has been strong. Here is the part people forget, because my career outside of higher education actually began in architectural illustration. Before the classrooms, before the degrees on the wall, I was creating beautiful renderings of spaces for interior designers, all by hand, just the way I learned to do it in design school my freshman year.
I love teaching it and I love doing it, and more than anything I love serving the interior designers who still believe in hand skills, who want to create design the old way, by hand, with their own hand and their own brain and their beautiful ideas landing on paper. As we say at the school, a sketch is the beginning of everything, the birth and genesis of every great idea, and I built this place to bring sketching back and make it a mark of the future, an indispensable part of every designer's toolkit.
Why I Left Higher Education to Teach Hand Rendering
So why did I leave a career I loved? Because of the red tape. The committees and the approvals and the slow grind that always seemed to sit between a teacher and the moment a student finally understands something. I watched bright people sit in those seats because their parents had paid for them to be there, not because the work lit them up, and I knew in my bones that I could teach better. I knew my students could learn more, that they could learn for real instead of just learning enough to pass and move on.
Higher education taught me how to be a teacher, a professor, a mentor, and a professional commercial interior designer, and I will always honor that. But it did not teach me how to make art, even with that art degree to my name, and that gap is one of the reasons I knew I had something different to offer.
What Mentoring Interior Designers Taught Me About Mindset
When I started teaching outside the school, mentoring professional interior designers privately, one to one, I learned something I did not expect. I realized how much mindset has to do with what we actually achieve. I sat with talented, accomplished people and watched how many of them carried so little confidence in themselves, and it honestly broke my heart. So I jumped in head first. I kept asking myself, how can I help, how can I help other people live the kind of life I get to live, doing what I love, creating art for interior design and teaching it too.
Those one to one sessions have been such a delight, and the truth is they grew me as much as they grew the people I was teaching. We worked on mindset first, then on hand rendering, drawing, and sketching, and sometimes we sat with real design projects they had on the books and worked through them together. Every session reminded me why I left in the first place.
My Hustle Is Stronger Than My Struggle
I do not brag about money, but I am going to be honest with you, because I think it matters. I have made more money since leaving my higher education career than I ever made in my life. How did I do it? I believed I could, and I have not stopped yet. In my first year out, I did over a million dollars in sales with very low overhead, and I will admit I did not even realize how much I had made until October of that year, which was far too late to think about a smart tax strategy, so I simply paid what I owed and kept moving.
I did all of that with a belief mindset, with hustle, and with strategy I learned from my four coaches, while I sat at home and colored all day. Yes, that is really where it happened for me. Could that happen for you too? It can. I have always said that my hustle is stronger than my struggle, and I have proved that to myself, to my parents, and to everyone who did not believe in me back at my old career. I have not stopped, and I am not stopping.
The Dream: Building a Design Visualization School
So here is the dream. I am building a school in the spirit of SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, a real institution devoted to the art of design visualization, the first of its kind. I dream of teaching people to be free, to be creative across every medium, to step outside their comfort zone and make something fascinating that belongs entirely to them. I have spent the last few years falling in love with learning new mediums, and now I want to hand that whole experience to others as an invitation. Come create. Come be free.
The vision for the Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization is to become the leading institution for the art of design visualization across every discipline of design, to set new standards for the industry, and to turn BW into a mark of honor. The mission is to offer exceptional courses, materials, and tools that empower designers to form, visualize, and communicate their ideas with intention, clarity, and precision.
How the Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization Works: Online, Live, and In Person
I am building toward a physical school and a new art studio, and that is the long arc of this dream. But I am not waiting to begin, so for now the school lives online. I will keep teaching classes online and live, because I want to actually engage with you, not just send a video off into the void where I never get to see your work or answer your questions. And I will host a few in person events each year too, because there is nothing better than sitting beside someone and teaching them, the pencil in their hand and my eyes on their page, those small adjustments that change everything.
My next endeavor is one I am especially excited about. I am preparing to offer a hand rendering certification for the people already inside my school, and it is coming soon. I am as excited about that certification as I am to jump online and teach a class every single week, and that is saying something, because teaching is the great joy of my life.
Come Start Your Hand Rendering Journey at BW School
This school is my north star, and naming it out loud keeps me moving toward it even while the building is still a blueprint in my mind. Maybe you have a north star of your own, a skill you have always wanted to own, a creative life you have been circling for years, a version of your work that finally feels like yours. If hand rendering, sketching, and learning to create freely are part of that picture, then I would love to teach you.
I invite you to join the Bertrand Williams School of Design Visualization and start your journey with us today.
Sketch on,
Shannin