How to Drop Out of Design School and Not Become a Worthless Hipster

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/fa803a373635

by nvk • 13 years ago

22 12 13 years ago

arcosdev2• 13 years ago

What a bunch of drek. Go to engineering school, go to law school, accounting school, hell you want to be a good designer go get a degree in psychology - but whatever you do don't waste a second on a useless business degree. Learn how to actually do something.

solistice2• 13 years ago

Whilst I get that there's the everlasting suit and cargo pants war, a business degree in conjunction with personal design work, or a engineering degree with personal business experiments makes one hell of a combo.

When you're founding a startup, your team needs to have certain skills spread between the members. One is sufficient technical savy to put together a product (engineering, graphic design, product design, programming, etc.), and the other is sufficient business acumen to make people buy that product (market analysis, marketing, accounting, salesmanship, negotiation, planning).

There is this belief often held with engineering heavy crowds which is "Build a better mousetrap, and they will come". They won't. Your potential customers won't suddenly feel a tingle in their stomach leading them to the store in order to buy your mousetrap. That tingle needs careful engineering as well, as well as getting the mousetrap into the stores, handling the payment processing, paying the manufacturers, you get the picture.

Similarily, there's the belief in the marketing crowd that "I can sell you anything, I just need a product". It's equally flawed, out of obvious reasons.

So obviously engineers want nothing to do with slimy business people, and businesspeople want to have at least 3 layers of organization between them and the filthy engineers. So if you can step into both pairs of shoes, you can bridge that gap and you're at a distinct advantage.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

The problem is that business school doesn't teach you to close a sale or manage an organization (vital skills, true). Its a place to learn useless business theory and network with classmates (which is only as valuable as the selectivity of the program).

pnathan• 13 years ago

* sales & customer service

* marketing

* accounting

are all required for a successful and effective business. Of course its possible to learn these on the fly, but why not sponge up some knowledge without taking the high levels of risk involved in starting your own business.

camworld• 13 years ago

Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.

The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.

harrytuttle• 13 years ago

If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement

That actually made me laugh because 90% of the people we see think that is design.

saltyknuckles• 13 years ago

+1 I second that lol

spiek• 13 years ago

This is basically link bait dressed up in medium clothes (spammy title and "in your face" bro attitude and all).

It presupposes that the end goal is MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE. It views school as an end to the goal, not as a worthwhile four years where you get to experiment and make mistakes, and grow, and try weird shit that would never fly in the business world and get way into some obscure random shit.

It seems to ignore any of the possible soul involved in artistic creation. I'm having trouble putting down why I disliked this article so much, but I can say that if I had enough karma to downvote it, I would have.

moeamaya• 13 years ago

There are two major things missing from a self-driven design education. First, going through a rigorously instituted design process which in turn helps develop and mature your criticality. The addendum mentions having a mentor which is useful even at the professional level. Where school differs is that you get strong, unequivocal critiques from people you may not always agree with, but these are often the most discerning and poignant criticisms. The design studios I learned the most from were always from the critics I most disagreed with, because they inherently challenge my preconceptions of ideas. The second things I see as a challenge is not participating in the design studio culture. In school you often learn from your peers, since you are all working on the same design prompt but have vastly different perspectives. It's such an engaging and energetic situation where you see the iteration and problem solving where someone is working on the same problem you are but has an entirely new approach.

These are some of my thoughts on formal design education, but I do think these ideas could be incorporated into an auto-didactic designer curriculum.

How to Drop Out of Design School and Not Become a Worthless Hipster

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