With my alma mater beginning a new school year this week, I want to give the students at the Design Program there two more advice to continue from the list I started last November.
Have a Life Outside of Design
Don’t let design be your life. I’m not talking about doing all-nighters in the final two or three weeks of each quarter/term and declining invitations to parties. You may love design, but it’s not everything. I have quoted Michael Bierut before that “design is about everything,” but that doesn’t mean design is everything; it’s about everything else.
Have a separate passion: music, the environment, politics, sports, love, whatever. That way, 1) you have an escape if you get frustrated with design or have a designer’s block, and 2) you have a topic on which to base your next design project.
That’s partly why I chose to go to UC Davis instead of an art school; I got to be around people of different interests: Bio-chem majors, Engineering majors, Sociology majors, etc., and I got to take different types of classes, and learn about nutrition and grammar and neuroscience and exercise and acting and a bunch of other non-design topics. Take advantage of college, especially since you’re paying so much for it.
Teach Yourself
It’s not that they’re not doing a good job, but our professors and faculty are there to give you information and guide you with their knowledge about the subject; you have to use that information for what you want to do. Just because it’s a class on ActionScript doesn’t mean that you just need to complete the bare minimum of the assignments and you’ll be an AS expert. You know that one student who’s exceptionally good with it? Yeah, he/she didn’t learn it from a class, it’s from self-teaching.
So do yourself a favor, and teach yourself what you don’t know but want to, be it a programming language or the history of printing. You can take a class if you don’t know where to start, but in the end you are the one who’s going to have to do it; no one can live your life and learn ActionScript for you.
Flush.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 23:32 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] school year for my alma mater. For the past two years, I gave some advice to design students (2007, 2008), whether they just started, or that they’re one year from graduating. I reviewed the previous [...]