Deadly sins of design education
Who is this article for? Junior/intern designers, students, and others eager to join the industry; educators; could also fit for developers and other tech roles.
TL;DR
Avoid fast education and find your content through industry-renown publishers and smart-looking people on LinkedIn. Podcasts won’t hurt. Most importantly, adjust your learning style as your skills expand. Uniform education may fit only at the start.
A dramatic black&white TV narrative for you to continue reading
The quality of design education gets worse. We have more and more people joining the industry, and thus more courses and practices are coming up each year. The entry-level gets higher, people strive to outpace everyone and are learning on Instagram and Youtube with a slice of pizza instead of a notebook.
Education and content creation have a lot in common: certain posting/learning frequency, a defined target audience, and tone of voice. The bad thing is that content creation comes with an extra pile that can be detrimental to one’s education. So here is my stone at fast education:
Fast education is mainly a product of fast content creation: ambiguous, repetitive, oversimplified, and shiny.
Cult of inspiration
There are many websites, newsletters, and awards, showing you the pure perfection of what the design can be. Don’t make a cult out of inspiration and set yourself up for failure.
This is real life: with deadlines, tight budgets, and lazy developers. While you can and should strive for the best, it won’t always be the case. They say “steal like a designer,” — and it’s okay to get inspired by great ideas, but don’t let those ideas become a benchmark for what you do.
Outtake: let YOUR work be a ground benchmark. If you have enough practice, your work will also be on a wall of fame one day.
One-size-fits-all education
“How to design a website,” “What is good research,” and “How to sacrifice a sheep.” You have seen posts like these. Well, maybe except for the sheep sacrifice. As you practice, you will find your tools and books, inspiration, and workflow.
Unless you are a beginner, uniform education won’t likely fit your context or job. It may be sufficient for ground knowledge, but don’t get stuck looking for everything at the same time. Get specific, and adjust your learning style as you grow. Instead of taking three different-complexity design courses, dig deeper. Are you interested in enterprise UX? Are you interested in mobile animation? Are you interested in VR/AR? Go for it!
There is an exception for design generalists, but at that point, they dig for specifics on different levels, not knocking on the same tree.
Outtake: you’re not eating the same sandwich eight times a day, don’t let your education become the same sandwich.
Resource library ≠ Expertise
As a beginner or a design student, it’s easy to fall into the trap of the resource bite. You know these posts: “Top 10 free icon websites”, “Best fonts for 2022”, “Top 5 illustration resources”. Instead of elaborating on two or three specific resources, they give you this list you have already seen and will see again.
The problem is that people will like and save multitudes of these posts, scrolling through the same icons and fonts instead of growing their expertise.
And yes, I do get some dopamine by browsing the fonts and pictures. If this is about joy for you, the sin is forgiven.
Outtake: Google will find this faster than your bookmark history.
Label hypocrisy
When was the last time you’ve seen a post about the differences between UI and UX? Perhaps it was a Venn diagram, perhaps it was two lists or some holacracy-style imagery.
Of course, UI/UX is rather a platitudinal example, but there are hundreds of posts on any label you pick. Bad sources of information exploit the impostor syndrome at its’ best – inadvertently reinforcing the doubt rather than letting you find your own definitions.
Outtake: Design is not physics. Stop looking for the right answers or definitions.
Critique experts
Critique breeds progress. But critique from those that can’t offer a solution should be taken with a grain of salt. Handling and providing critique are whole skill that takes courage to acquire.
Don’t get fooled; there is still no perfect sphere in the universe. You can improve it — do it. If not — learn and do it later; no need to overthink.
Outtake: learn to handle and critique yourself and others. Sometimes it doesn’t end in a truce, so don’t stress about it.
“Not sure what I’m doing here” teachers/influencers
There are two educator mindsets detrimental to education:
- “Who am I to give lessons” line of thought, stopping many people from teaching due to a lack of expertise, confidence, or reasoning. This one is also an often show-stopper for those who just began their teaching/author practice.
- “Anybody can teach” line of thought. While it sounds motivating, it’s often the main reason for the poopie-stamping of education materials. Along with the bit-sized education becoming popular, it has created an army of cheap educators searching for audiences and clients. Spending a few hundred in ad cabinets, authors will find both. But their audience will be duped and sporadically replaced.
Both points have their issues, and you should probably hold back from becoming an educator if you clearly fall into either of them. There were multiple times I planned to record a course, to write a guidebook, and, phew, I didn’t.
Outtake: No one is driven out of sheer benevolence. Think of the reasons why they provide education.
Summary
That’s it for my shortlist of the deadly sins of design education. Do any others come to mind? Feel free to share them in the comments.
And I will repeat the TL;DR from above:
Avoid fast education and find your content through industry-renown publishers and smart-looking people on LinkedIn. Podcasts won’t hurt. Most importantly, adjust your learning style as your skills expand. Uniform education may fit only at the start.
