Prepare repetitive work in advance

You will have to make presentations, you will need to hand in reports and PDFs. Prepare models for all these now.

This has three advantages:

• you can work faster — and any time you can gain before you start is time you can spend on other things;
• you can create a consistent image for your work;
• and you don’t need to waste time thinking and preparing how to present your work, just stick it into place in your models.

Also remember to revise these models each year. Incorporate all that you have learned from your mistakes as well as using your developing personal taste and skills.

If you want to receive, give first

It is much much better to be courted than to be the one running after everyone else. So get out now and do things that you can give away to others. It can be a blog [not just reposted images of cats, do something real, and dangerous for a change], tutorials, videos, a crazy project — a drawing, a photo, a song, a video, a postage stamp a day for three years… If you are making something interesting and new happen on a regular schedule then people will find you, seek you out even, and open doors for you. You will make opportunities happen.

Connect

Seek out other people. Look at the companies doing work that interests you, places where you’d like to work, people you’d like to work with. Then follow them on social networks, follow their boards on Pinterest, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Forums… If they write blog posts or articles, leave [intelligent] comments. Connect, be part of the conversation. Who knows, if you say and do interesting things, perhaps they’ll follow you too…

Get some protection

During your studies your computer will catch fire, get stolen, get showered in coffee, suffer a hard drive failure, fall and smash its screen, get trodden on… That’s life. And it’s also no excuse for delivering late work as it is entirely predictable.

Get a free Dropbox, box.net, SkyDrive, Google Drive account [or all of these, or another service entirely], and keep backups of your work there. Most of these have a web interface which means you can then access your documents from any computer. Or from your new one.

Fail often, and fail fast

Students, even good ones, prepare a project and then work up to getting everything together at the very end. And then generally spend the last night in a panic getting everything finished in time. Before lurching on to the next panic.

This is not an effective way of working.

Start early, then pause. Starting early gives your mind time to grapple with the problem; the pause gives it time to reflect, assess, sort, and come up with more ideas. If you wait to start working, you are missing this very productive phase.

Get something primitive up and functioning as soon as possible: once this is done, you can see how to improve it, see if your initial ideas and hunches work out.

You will also get a better idea of the work involved — perhaps the final work is too complex and you need to scale back; perhaps it is easier than you thought and you can develop things further. Perhaps you’ll get new ideas en route. But you’ll get none of this if you wait until the last minute to finish.

And if the worse comes to the worse — you get ill, your cat eats your computer, your house collapses… — and you no longer have the time you thought, you still have something that functions, just not optimally, but you can present that. And that is always better than nothing.

Prototype on paper

When you work on a computer you have two dangers in front of you:

• the time you invest getting a sketch together is always longer than you think;
• and then the sketch starts to take on the veneer of finishedness.

This means that when we are working on a bad idea, or when we have taken a wrong turn, and we’re working on a computer we are reluctant to throw everything away and start over.

Paper is cheap, lightweight, portable, flexible, remarkably resilient. You can sketch ideas and pin them up, chat them over, iterate, reiterate and reiterate again, comment and improve them, all on more paper. You can work at school, at home, in public transport, in a café, on a bench, at a friend’s house, in the toilet [bathroom, for my American friend]… and it is much easier to scribble right over a sketch or drawing, or just throw it away when it doesn’t work.

Put things away for the winter

We have the privilege of living in Paris, one of the most significant cities in the world when talking about culture. Most museums here are free for students and under 26 year-olds. Most exhibitions have reduced pricing for students, especially art students.

Amazingly enough, Public Libraries are places that want you to come in and take books away. For free. Anyone with an address and some ID can get a library card for the Parisian municipal libraries. If you live outside Paris there is probably a municipal library there too. There are specialised libraries and documentation centres in Paris and around. As you are a student you can even go to the National Library and consult books and documents there. You can find books on painting, sculpture, dance, opera, drama, music, the graphic arts, advertising, motion design, cinema, animation, digital design, industrial design, poetry… You can even get comics and novels. All these are ways of getting ideas and references, and stocking them away in your head for later.

Go out there and look and sketch and photograph and build up your memories, your experiences, your references. These you can stock away for when you will need them. Put them away for when you are busy working for customers and you no longer have time, for when you have small kids of your own and you can’t get out any more. Put it all away to help you get through the winter.

Inspiration is everywhere

Look around. There are parks with trees and flowers and birds and people. There are buildings old and new, designed and decaying, interesting and boring. There are people old and young, walking and wearing clothes both fashionable and informal. There are shops with window displays and others with goods just piled up high out in front. There are posters and ads and billboards. You will watch films and TV series, you will play games. Perhaps you will go to concerts and dance and opera and installations and I-don’t-know-what-else too.

All these are inspirations. All this is happening around you. All ready to spark ideas and references and emotions and remembrances and make your work richer.

Worry about how you look

At the end of each project, update your online portfolio to include the work you just finished. Don’t forget to mention that it is school work, give the brief, the media, the format, the date, your references, the names of your teachers, if you used interesting software you can mention it here. If there was a challenge or something special that worked for you here, talk about that too.

Every six months, update your résumé. Perhaps it’s now time to take out those jobs you did back when you were still a teenager, and add in your latest accomplishments and achievements. Remember to update your résumé if it is online, or on LinkedIn or Behance or somewhere like that.

Once a year, prune your online portfolio. Work that no longer represents you gets cut out or moved to an archive or a back room. If your work focus has shifted, then your portfolio should reflect that. Move your best work to the front. Make sure you’re saying what you what to say to the best of your abilities.

Remember that what will interest potential employers is not just beautifully finished and showcased work, but your process — how you got to that result. Include workcases, ‘making of’ videos, a detailed brief, your notes and references. This will not only allow everyone to see how you work, but also allow them to project — Will this person fit in here ? Can I imagine working with this person ?

Put your best face forwards

Presentations are horrible. Time goes too fast and too slow. Your mouth goes dry. When you don’t forget what you have to say, your words come out wrong. Your slides are useless, illegible, too big and too small.

So practise your presentations in front of your friends. Listen to the criticism, and criticise them back as you’d like to be criticised. Work on your message and then your slides. Time yourself. Breathe.

The first time you do a presentation you think you’re going to die. After about 15 presentations you start to believe in resurrection. After a couple of years, you might even find yourself enjoying them.

Ask yourself what you want your audience to take away from your presentation. What message, what idea ? Then work on getting that across.

Study good presenters. Look at TED talks. Look at a Steve Jobs keynote.

The role of a presentation is not to inform people, if that was the case a simple text message, e-mail or a PDF would be enough. The role of a presentation is to effect change.

So start by changing yourself.

That’s what friends are for…

Everyone has got a friend who is good at spelling, at grammar, at punctuation. Get that friend to read over and correct everything you write and produce. Perhaps you have a friend who is good at typography. Or someone who can look at a layout and say what is right and what is wrong, and nudge you into doing it right. Someone who has a natural eye for colour or photos or composition. Or someone who just seems to eat and drink and breathe code or AfterEffects… And what can you bring to the table ?

If all of you work together you are all making each other’s work stronger and better. As a group you are many times stronger than each of you individually.

Learn to criticise [and take criticism]

Criticise the work, never the person. Look for something good and say it, then look for something interesting to say, then say the bad. In this way, if what you have said at first stands up, any negative criticism will be weighed against the truth of what you said first and have more impact.

Stay objective. The question is never whether you like the work, or if it is [in your opinion] ugly, but: Does it answer the question, solve the problem, correspond to the brief ?

You are not the public. Our work is made with a specific public in mind. What would that person say, what would that person think ? If that person wouldn’t like it, try to say why.

Make good mistakes

Don’t expect to get top notes for everything. You’re studying to learn. The major part of that process is making mistakes. When — not if — you make a mistake, learn from it. Don’t make it again. That leaves you more time to make new mistakes next time. In a certain manner, the more mistakes you can make while studying, the more you can learn.

Also remember that school is also the best place to make mistakes. You don’t have a client who will be disappointed. You don’t have a boss to wonder why she ever hired you. You don’t have co-workers who will judge you, just fellow students who are busy making their own mistakes. So try new things, overreach, experiment. Aim to get your mistakes out of your system before you get pushed out into the ‘real’ world.

Own your name

Facebook, Vimeo, Behance or whatever are good places to put out your productions and get them known, but you really need to own your work, and own your name.

What will you do tomorrow if, say, Facebook says: If you want your posts to circulate… now you must pay 1 euro a slot, or 50 euros a month… By having a place where you can present your work, on your own terms, linked to from your presence on all the social sites where you also post, you ensure that whatever happens, your work is always out there, always available.

So get your portfolio and book together now, on your own domain, on your own server.

…and remember

Remember all the dumb and stupid and marvellous and crazy things you are doing. One day you might come back as a teacher…