LEARNING: Do Designers Need A Degree?
We are all aware, we don’t need to attend school to learn. Learning can take place anywhere and we should be learning all the time, it simply takes form as an interest in something. The act of creating with your hands, learning VR or honing your skills in the kitchen. None of these requires a formal education.
The idea of our education system is shifting and has for some time now. I think education in general, exist in an extremely broken system, in order to earn your degree from a University, you literally have to mortgage your life. Many rake up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, all for what? A piece of paper that doesn’t guarantee you a job of any kind, much less one in your chosen field. I’m reminded of the word of Good Will Hunting;
“you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.”
There is so much truth to that, especially in today’s technology-driven world. A world were kids anywhere are learning viable skills by simply “tinkering” with their gadgets at home, for fun. Of course, I am very aware this does not apply to every field, and for good reason; I want my doctors to have the required education to practice medicine. If I ever need a lawyer, I want them to know the actual law and I want licensed engineers to build all the buildings, air crafts and bridges we use daily without giving a second thought to whether or not they will hold. And while all this is true, I still don’t think one should have mortgage their lives to do it.
Dropping Out Of College
I grew up in a middle-class family and like most middle-class families, it was super important for my parents that I go to college. Neither one of them ever earned one, my mom was a stay at home wife/mom who graduated high school with a GED and my dad had only one semester of college under his belt before he landed a job as a deckhand in the oil field when I was three. He made good money, but it was hard manual labor and he had to spend the equivalent of half the year away from us in order to do so.
Like most parents, they wanted more for me. The problem was I never saw myself needing to go to college. I wanted to be an artist. That was my passion, my calling. Then when I was a junior in high school I discovered an occupation that changed my life forever. Tucked away from the main buildings of campus were some larger more studio like buildings with classes that I had no idea the school even offered as electives.
The field of Communication Design was introduced to me and I was in love. I was introduced to a Mac for the first time: an Apple II in all its beige, boxy glory, loaded with photoshop 2.0 and it was magical. I spent the next two years immersing myself in the world of intellectual conceptualization. I was introduced to a very gestalt way of thinking, it wasn’t about making things look pretty at all it was about the meaning behind it. The creation of visual elements and the principles that shape them.
After graduation, I attended a local community college. As a middle-class family, we didn’t have money laying around for college and my parents were never in a position to save up for my college education. Community college was the smart option and as it later turned out the best choice I could have made.
The classes were small enough that we had lectures and lab in the same room; something I would learn later would make all the difference, and our instructors were actual working designers some freelance and some who worked for agencies.
I was a part of a program called the two for two program. You spend your first two years at a local community college before moving on to a university for your remaining two years and finally a degree. What I didn’t realize about the smaller classes in community college is that we were getting a hands-on first-rate learning experience. We all had computers in front of us, even the instructor had a Mac attached to one of those projection systems. So that what every they did on their computers we could actually see and follow along on our computers. This was more invaluable than I realized at the time. We were also taught the fine art of ‘constructive’ critique.
I remember thinking man, I can’t wait to get to university I can only image how much more I’ll be learning.
I could not have been more wrong.
The classes were surprisingly not much larger the only real difference was lecture and critique happened outside of the computer lab. Which also meant there was no instructor showing you how the software worked. Instead, that was left up to whichever student aid happened to be in the lab at the time and they were usually too immersed in their own projects to bother to look up from their screens.
After the first critique, I knew I was left feeling both advanced in my knowledge of Photoshop and disappointed that at a Junior level they knew so little. The project was to create a composite image using three separate items to convey a story within a single image.
Of a list that was handed around, I chose alcoholism. I took three separate images, one of a bottle, one of a person and one of water in motion. I developed them and scanned them into photoshop where I proceeded to mask, skew, resize and weld the opacity slider like a boss. The following week I present my project for critique and I was stunned.
The majority of my critique wasn’t about my work at all, but rather ‘How’ I had achieved such a realistic piece. Most didn’t understand masking and even fewer had ever heard of the opacity tool. Here I was in a University level Communication Design class imagining visual serendipitous knowledge of epic proportions being dropped on me and instead I was explaining things to my classmates I learned at a junior college.
The knowledge I gained in community college also allowed me to land a job working full time for print/design shop while attending my classes after work in the evenings. After the start of my second semester and seeing much of the same, to my extreme disappointment, I dropped out.
I saw no point in attending classes I could teach rather than learn anything new in craft, and I certainly didn’t want to pay university prices for a ‘top notch’ education I wasn’t receiving. My only regret was feeling like I had let down my parents.
So was a college degree necessary for me? Not at all, I still don’t have one and no one has ever asked if I do. I certainly didn’t stop me from going freelance and running my own business. I walked away with $12,000 in debt a tiny number when you look at the average. I’m glad I attended community college, I learned much more in two years that would have been possible on my own. It also taught me how to communicate and explain my thought process behind my designs, that was invaluable and it afforded me the confidence in my abilities to land my first design job while still attending classes.
So while I believe as a designer/developer it is by no means critical that you attend college or earn a degree to be a good designer, I wouldn’t overlook the benefits of taking a few classes at your local community college just to get your feet wet, learn the in’s and out’s of the programs you will use most, and learn how to think about your design and discuss you thoughts on why that was the right choice for that project.
I believe the only reason people hiring designers or creatives, in general, ask for a degree is simply because they don’t understand the craft or the skills they should be looking for in designers. They don’t understand what makes a “good” designer or the questions they should be asking in an interview. So they follow the hiring practices of every other field and look for the achievement of a degree, unwittingly thinking this is what makes for a good designer.
But if any of them graduated from a University similar to the one I attended, even just briefly, I can tell you that will not be the case. That piece of paper does not make you a good designer; knowing every aspect of your craft, always learning and honing your skills, being able to communicate your thoughts to your clients and colleagues and being willing to take risks with your designs, that’s what starts to make you good.
First appeared on my personal blog
