Design education

Given the immense volume of skill and understanding a design professional must possess, education is paramount. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misunderstanding and wrong understanding as to what, specifically, that education should include and how one can best acquire it. Add to this the fact that academic education, by design, provides things other than professional preparation and you get, well, something akin to the state of today’s design profession.

Education is not something you’re given, but something you must steal. It’s not something you get, but something you pursue. Constantly. Whether one is a designer, an attorney, a senior chef, a young stage actor, or a practicing physician; there’s a word for professionals who have stopped pursuing an education: obsolete.

As a professional, your work is measured not merely by what you bring forth, but by what you bring forth in context. Every day some measure of contextual change occurs in the world in which you operate. Failure to habitually mark, measure, and respond to these contextual changes will leave you increasingly unfit to practice your profession.

Education should be a professional habit. If you want to be a responsible design professional, make it one of yours.

Pro Tip:

You will not be allowed to achieve any significant success unless you are highly educated in things other than design. A design professional must possess a liberal education that is not overwhelmed by design-centric issues.

Design education

A design professional must first be a competent designer, yet many today are not. Sadly, many of designers I question tell me that no one ever taught them the fundamentals of artistry. They tell me that their formal education in high school, college, or (most regrettably) design school failed to include any reference to the communicative basics for artistic vocabulary of line, form, color, and texture. I’m also told that the artistic grammar of contrast, harmony, balance, and distribution were only mildly referenced in their design studies.

To put this into perspective, this situation is very like practicing physicians saying that human anatomy and physiology were only mildly referenced in their studies if at all. In any other profession, an educational void such as this would be cause for serious alarm. In the design profession, however, it would seem to be considered merely an inconvenient but largely irrelevant issue. Only it’s not.

It is one thing to be professionally unprepared, but to lack foundational design understanding is to be incompetent. If you aspire toward a more professional practice, you must work to eliminate the voids in your education, especially those concerned with design’s foundation.

The Academic Path

This is not to say that all academic web design programs are without merit; just that most of them are. There are, however, a few high-quality institutions with good programs. For instance, Hyper Island, SVA’s Interaction Design program and Carnegie Mellon’s Interaction Designprogram each offers a solid curriculum, but there aren’t too many others that do. If you look at what these institutions and programs offer and what they demand, you get the sense that they’re serious about delivering on the promise of their course descriptions.

You may have noticed that the few quality design programs are largely graduate programs. There is a good reason for this, and it indicates their importance as simply part of a good education: these programs are specialized, and as such do not constitute a foundation degree. I highly recommend that any aspiring designer interested in academic education first acquire a basic liberal arts degree or equivalent before pursuing one of these specialized programs. Education should initially be about preparing you as a responsible, competent human being. Skipping that in favor of specialized interest smacks of fetish, and it won’t prepare you for any profession.

The most important lesson an aspiring design professional can learn is to take responsibility for his or her own education. Your education is up to you. Your teachers and professors can’t “learn” you anything. You have to learn it, internalize it, and make it your own so that you apply your understanding intuitively in practice. What’s more, it is not your teachers’ job to prepare you for life or to give you the entire syllabus for what is required. Their job is to point the way toward the path you should follow. Period.

Each individual component or topic that your teacher/professor includes in a course syllabus is but the surface of great depths or the opening to a deep rabbit hole. What should be understood (and seldom is) is that your mandate is then to fully explore those depths on your own or with others outside of the classroom. The full lesson will not be spoon-fed to you!

Your education is not what you receive in class, but rather what you discover in further study. If you fail to recognize and act on this fact your education will be entirely inadequate. As one working to become a professional, an overall assumption of responsibility is the position from which all of your activities and choices must come; starting with the fact that your education is your responsibility.