What they don't teach you in design school
Graphic Design degrees are confusing;
most people externally think of design students as and extension of the arts program, internally design students think of themselves as creators but remain defiantly against being associated with fine art students.
What are they then?
Design students live in a fluctuating ever evolving world half way between fine art and computer science if you can imagine it. Some specialize in print material; creation of posters, packaging, handouts, shirt designs, labels, you name it. Some specialize in web development and flutter between learning web languages such as HTML and CSS to create the front end visuals for web pages and apps. Even less spend time between print and web working between marketing, advertising, front end web, and prototyping. (these are the highest ranked assets for companies based on their flexible skill sets and knowledge.)
Who they work for. . .
companies rang from adverting and marketing agencies to start ups, on line developer groups, packaging, and freelance. Anyone who has a need for a visuals needs a designer of some sort and will pay ridiculously high and low amounts for work. in the old days it was a more common occurrence for design agencies to me separated from clients and the organizations requesting work. Today it is becoming increasingly more common for companies to house design and development teams in house as reporting, marketing, and design have become internalized assets.
easy right?
This is the issue, design is changing but the curriculum isn't. While there is a lot of money in advertising and packaging many designers are not being taught critical web skills in the evolving world of front end web development and prototyping. programs such as principle and sketch have replaced the outdated adobe fireworks and other wire framing tools. print is being replaced with web and creating front end prototypes now falls on the designer for development as well as working with corresponding back end developers to build out complete sites. Professors push print, 11 x 17 prints, magazines, billboards, but now one is pushing for the web.
What do they need?
Students need to reach out and break past the world of print and adapt along side print in prototyping. Students should be more immersed in going beyond HTML and CSS to learning JavaScript. Web development should be pushed toward new evolution's in the field. Print and Web should be equals. It simply makes it easier to find better, higher paying, jobs.
Scared?
Dont be! The world of JavaScript and prototyping arnt just for complex back-end developers, its easy. All any one has to do is explore the web for new programs, ideas, styles. Most programs have very quick learning curves and are more user friendly than ever. Front end languages for the web are fairly logical in structure and are easy for read. There are many open source web sources for learning to write code and for understanding complex ideas in small understandable chunks. Code on the web is open source! No need to pay, find what you need and experiment with it. Just Go!
-M
