S*** You Should’ve Learned in School…But Didn’t

When I think back to my design “education,” unanswered questions and frustrations come to mind. Regretfully, so do missed opportunities. They say hindsight is 20/20 but that doesn’t seem to help design students and young professionals who are doing their best with what they’re given today.

As much as my design education may have lacked, it did teach me one invaluable skill: how to teach myself new skills. There were countless days when I would leave class unsatisfied and full of spite. I regularly felt unprepared for the future. I would go home, Google search the topic of the day and whiz through YouTube tutorials. Eventually, I realized that my education wasn’t received through a curriculum that was given to me, it was self-imposed.

Once I came to this epiphany, I was able to focus on how I learn as an individual. Instead of studying concepts based in theory, I chose to learn by application. I would apply the design principles we were given in class to my own projects.

One example of this application was a final project for an illustration class. The assignment was to create a body of work that could also exist as individual pieces. I took a self-initiated series of posters and applied it to this assignment. I decided to create series of minimalist tourism posters for Kirksville, Missouri that poked fun at the city as a whole. Each included a scenic visual with a snarky phrase that most (if not all) Truman State students could relate to.

Once this project was completed, I decided to upload all eight posters to Behance and promote them. Pretty soon, people were reaching out to either purchase them or to commission new ones. This series had become a hit with a specific niche: past and present students from Truman State University who had experienced the subject matter of the posters. This was the audience I had in mind from the beginning. I soon realized that I had encountered my first lesson in “user-centered design.”

Here are some other lessons I know today that I would’ve liked to come across sooner:

• How to work effectively with interdisciplinary teams
• Scaling a personal project into a viable business
• Basic principles of interaction design
• Design research and writing
• Rapid product development
• How to verbally communicate my value as a designer (instead of visually)

When I review this list, I can’t help but notice that combined, all of these lessons make up a loose curriculum of entrepreneurial design. In some ways, I have learned these lessons either by exploring on my own or by personal experience. These are valuable lessons that should be a standard for design students all over the world. It’s never too late to start digging. You never know what you’ll learn along the way.

What is something you know now that you wish you would’ve learned in school? Let’s continue the conversation below or on Twitter at @williamfrazr.

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