designers makin' bank at a renegade craft fair booth.

Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times the other day; you toddle along and pretend to read it and I’ll wait here for you.

So basically, it turned on a light bulb over my head about a lot of what really burns my ass about design education: many design programs are completely out of step with what it actually means to be a designer. I can’t tell you how many designers I know who are either self-employed or own their own companies, and yet never have I once heard anything about a design program offering any business education at all. For the most part, they’re run like extensions of art programs, teaching mostly visual skills, maybe a little advertising too if you look hard enough. if this article’s any indication, these programs don’t think they should be teaching real-world skills. Like, you know, budgeting. Billing. Getting employees with non-normative sleep schedules into a normal schedule. Things every designer over the age of 25 has to deal with.

There’s one sentence in that piece at the NYT which echoed almost completely what I was really wondering about design education:

Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation.

The article essentially boils down to an assertion that universities’ importance lies in offering a student instruction on critical thinking, not practical knowledge.

Okay, I’ll buy that, I suppose. But, if university’s a way to learn how to think, who guides a student through the practical application of that learned critical awareness?

I mean, the things I need to do every day as an independent designer—learning how to read a client who’s on the fence about a new piece, structuring my assets so that all my eggs aren’t in one basket—who’s teaching students these common sense things of how to live as an artisan? Who’s teaching them that as the posessor of a basic and somewhat rare human skill that it could be in their interest to incorporate and protect everything they sell rather than working for someone else? I certainly don’t remember being handed any practically applied information like that at all, which resulted in an amazing loss of money and in some cases, being utterly taken for a ride by employers. I remember lots of color theory and endless hours of critique, but not one single seminar on how to get paid.

image: flickr member anonymous9000

Watts Martin explains what gets him twitching about #protest #hashtags on Twitter, and I would actually expand that to surround my own reasoning for not wanting anything to do with the Occupy protests: they are often used and performed from a point of total naiveté. continued

Visual communication is one of a few canaries in the coal mine of social change, but I’ve never been one to believe that it brings about social change. But having watched the Arab Spring and Occupy protests spring up around the planet, I begin to wonder how cut-and-dried that thought is. continued

I am just sick to my teeth of client work. I’m not even sure any more if it’s the right way to work any more. A couple of things have led me to that. continued

So I had a bit of a think about last Friday’s entry, in which I asserting that your best plan of self-promotion is to own your identity and presentation rather than joining a portfolio service. I should probably clarify why. continued

So, a couple of unrelated conversations—one with a client, one with a friend—got me to thinking about how designers are being more or less corralled into pens to display and move their work around the web.

There are several places designers are usually encouraged to display their work—sites like Bēhance, Coroflot and Dexigner, all easy-to-use, requiring no detailed technical knowledge to host a portfolio, all with a pretty robust set of social tools surrounding the artist.

That seems great upon first look. But the reality of the net is that it’s a brand game. continued

Hi. I wrote for Print magazine for a number of years, a column called Obsessions. When I took it on it was a collector’s curiosity column; a sort of “check out this awesome thing” exploratory written with an eye towards technology. At that point, a lot of the editorship didn’t feel the need to explore much about technology; it was still largely separate from design. That was back in 2005, when editorial and online people were not the same. Paper magazine were still considered viable. There was no such thing as a decent smartphone. continued