What To Expect out of a Design Career

By AJ Kandy

Young designers often set impossibly high standards and lofty goals. Are they setting themselves up for early disappointment? Here's our guide to the real entry-level designer's life - and it's got a lot of left turns.

The Dream: 

First, you go to a recognized design school, develop your own brand of post-deconstructionist Swiss-grid page layouts which win all the student awards, and graduate with honors. Then, you do post-grad studies somewhere prestigious - Yale perhaps; hobnob with superstar professors and visiting lecturers. You intern at a blue-chip New York design firm, do brilliant work, get noticed. After graduation, you're hired on as an art director, then senior AD, then partner... You get your own office with an Aeron chair, Bouroullec furniture, the latest G5 computer with 30" Apple flat-panel monitor, big sunny windows and a door that closes.  Of course you're a brilliant team leader, respected mentor and teacher, volunteering after hours and during the summer to teach design to underprivileged, inner-city kids. You publish your monograph and have your gallery retrospective. Every so often you jet over to London for drinks with Damien Hirst. You're on the experts panel at several conferences; judge Print magazine's regional design awards; do the lecture circuit when you're not busy tending to your herb garden in Provence...and the alarm clock rings. Reality:

"Breakfast" is an energy bar purchased at the newsstand.  You pull up to a faceless glass office-park building and tumble blearily through the revolving doors: These are the Midwest offices of Acme Inc, your employer for the past three years since graduation.  Your office is a cubicle lined with outdated Post-It Notes and soundtracked by unavoidable gossip from Sales, one row over. Your latest pay stub sits on the desk, but you don't open it; your $35K salary hasn't budged since the last round of layoffs. You design data sheets and catalogues for Acme's line of industrial plastics equipment, with all the thrills that it entails. Though you didn't train for it, you also handle the company Web site. Every six months or so, the CEO asks if you can make the Web site "more blue," and makes worrying noises about how "a Flash intro would be really cool." Your computer is an aging, underpowered PC, and you had to fight with the IT department to get a 19" monitor.

So You Want To Be A Design Superstar? We live in, arguably, a fantastic time to be in the design profession. The pages of STEP, Wallpaper, ID and HOW simply drip with hot, new, young influential designers who do cool stuff. They thrill us with their revolutionary aesthetics, impress us with their multimillion-dollar design/snowboarding/music businesses, and how they just won a plum contract to add some hip to a staid old Fortune 500 firm.  It's heady and inspiring, and like MTV, an endless procession of youth and novelty. Presented in this carefully edited, glamorous way, design seems so easy, ripe for the plucking for anyone with a bit of talent.  If anyone can play guitar, the democratic access to design means thousands of students take up Rapidograph pens, CAD software and theAdobe Creative Suite. But are their superstar career expectations setting them up for a fall? Reading some design forums online, I waded into several threads where junior designers chafed at having their brilliant ideas passed over by senior art directors, as if recognition was a right and not something to be earned. Others, more realistic, felt trapped by boring work that paid the bills; in an economic downturn, it's not as easy to quit when you have debts and dependents. Both groups want creative satisfaction from their work, but what's been lost somewhere in the rush from mechanical to digital systems is the fact that what we do as designers is more often closer to Craft than Art. Craft implies an apprenticeship, literally years spent learning from the masters. Those young kids in the glossy magazines are talented, but they're also rare, more like child prodigies, gifted at 20 with a 50-something art director's insight. They're either demonstrating way-above-average drive, fierce competitiveness, or they really, really love what they do.  The rest of us? Well, we'll get back to that .