As I first wrote this post, it was a pretty huge mass of text. I decided to cut it in hald and make two separate posts in order to make something a egular human being could read wihout having to take a whole day.
In this part, I discuss (with myself) what should be learned (better than what should be taught).

School Vs Self taught

As we focused on the matter of design students, we totally forgo the self taught way. Having said that, it’s a complete mistake, since most of the actual designer generation didn’t go the way of the shcool benches. Let’s face it, most of the über-talented people still went to the top of the ladder with flying colors.
School is just the perfect place to let young talents bloom but success is in no way related to a degree.
Education is a combination of things you experience during your school and work years. Having less of the first should not be what makes you fail to produce quality work.
Actually, the real problem here is pretty clear: it’s all about implication. Whether you’re a student or someone who’s working to learn, as long as you don’t give a shit, nothing will happen.
Be curious, either way.

Technique over ethic?

A good designer needs to be able to do two kind of things: think and execute. That’s a given not everyone can do. People that only execute other’s ideas are stuck in making things that they don’t always care about. People who only think can’t feel the pride of making things by themselves. What should be teached is surely a combination of both.

I liked this quote by Jonathan Baldwin, read on Teddy Bradford’s blog:

We had been looking for a paradigm shift and this was it: we currently see design education as teaching people to design. Instead we want to teach people through design. We believe that graduates need to be politically and socially engaged. You’ll never achieve that [by] teaching Photoshop and yet this is what we fool ourselves in to thinking and claiming. Instead we [need to] shift [our] approach and teach students about the world in which they are living, using design as the tool to do that and allowing them to demonstrate what they have learned through design. Learning Photoshop then becomes a skill that is picked up to show understanding of the world, not because it is a skill in itself. … [Graduates] can still design, but what they are designing is a model of the world, a worldview if you like, rather than (God help us) a double page spread and a web site.

Most trainings I’ve seen lately concentrate on software manipulation, and I strongly believe it’s pretty wrong on several levels. Graphic design does not only mean using photoshop: everybody can learn to use a software reading a tutorial. Of course you shouldn’t be stuck by technical issues when designing. But a great idea, even if executed the old school way with pen and paper, stays a great idea. On the contrary, a sucky concept, even with lots of shiny photoshop effects and images hijacks will still suck in the end.

This goes a long way into a design career. Learning techniques has to go with staying aloft about trends, society, design rules and the like. You’re a thinking maker. So don’t forget to think, and don’t forget to make.

Design process

If there’s one thing to look for in a design education, it has to be process. I don’t remember it being explicitely described at school, but all I know is that when I went out, I did know what do to at work. Researches. Sketching. Concept. Producing. Explaining. Selling. All this, I learned at school, even if there was no course with such a title as “creating your very own creative process”. Maybe I had to shift a few things to adjust to clients, but in the end, it was all the same old thing. If you want to learn design, learn about yourself and your work habits first. You have to be able to know yourself perfectly to produce high quality work on demand.

Learning and to be taught

I’m always a bit aghast when I hear people telling me they didn’t learn a thing at school, blaming teachers, when they didn’t even took the time to actually come to school. Maybe it was boring. Maybe the teachers weren’t as passionate as you expected. But in the end, if you were pretty boring and uninterested yourself, who’s to blame ? Learning is a process, not a set of things you can list. If you feel like you’ve not learned a thing, you’ve missed a point: maybe you’ve learned patience or anger or that you’re unable to go through a regular scholarship model. If you’re implicated, you’ll learn — teachers are everywhere, from the top notch art history expert, the freelancer you’ve met over on twitter to the janitor who have seen more design students that you’ll ever meet in a life.

At first, I wanted to use the word teaching everywhere. But “being taught” seemed like a passive action, something you had to go through, instead of something that you do yourself. Learning is something that you should never stop to do. No matter what. You’re born talented, but you aren’t born knowledgable about everything. Be humble and listen. So that one day you can be the one to teach.

This is a follow up to my previous post: The death of graphic design.
The emerging question was “can creativity be taught” and if so, are people in design schools actually doing it wrong ?
We felt that maybe the decreasing quality in design production those past years may be due to a lack of proper education in the design field. I ain’t no teacher and do not wish to judge how people do their teaching. Plus, coming from a fine art (with a spe. in graphic design) background, I’ve got a pretty centered view of the design education field.

Teachers, as well as students, have a very different view of what should be taught during the school years and maybe none is good enough. Maybe it’s a mix of different influences that’ll end up making a proper “design education”. As for teaching creativity, I feel that it digs out the never ending question about skills and determinism: are your born creative or do you become a creative person over time? I guess it’s a set of tricky questions, and couldn’t help but fumble with it for the past week… the more I thought about it, the more it became clear that there’s no evident answer to that.

Can creativity be taught?

As a matter of fact, there’s a pretty simple answer to this one. Yes.
Creativity, as “being able to produce ideas and concepts on demand”, can be taught. You can teach people methods to produce ideas. You can train a brain to think about concepts. you can even teach someone to execute a task properly in order to make that idea happen. What you can’t do, tho, is force them to have GOOD ideas. You can teach them to be creative, you can even teach them to be skilled, but I definitely believe that you can’t teach someone to be talented if he or she hasn’t a single sparkle of talent in there.

What’s wrong with the design education

So, in the end, what’s the problem with design schools? Why are they so wrong that the jury from the Festival de Chaumont decided there were no student work fine enough to be presented to the world?
In my opinion, it’s not only about the schools.

. There’re too many people who want to become a designer. Courses are overcrowded, schools are multiplying like mushrooms, and wannabe designers are everywhere. As I said, you can teach everything but talent, and as long as selection won’t be harder, the quality level won’t rise. There are almost twice as much untalented people out there seeking for work than there are really great designers.

. But plenty of them are not ready to work it out. I will not say that design schools are perfect. Most of them lacks some fundamentals, like teaching people about professional life, technical issues, or design thinking. Many teachers are outdated, or have lost the faith. But how many students actually involve themselves into school life? How many learn by themselves — something they’ll need to do further in life anyway?

What’s wrong is that the only thing than can’t be teached is the only thing that definitely is missing in the design landcape. People with a view. Ambition. Talent. It’s not that they are less than before. It’s just that they’re drowned in the mass, hidden behind the thousands other people in front of them that showcase their work. Of course, awesome people will still get noticed. But great people, whose work would have catched your eyes in the past, are buried under others, and don’t have space to bloom to their full potential. Employers are being more selective because they can afford it. As a result, the average designer pay range is lowering, unemployement is rising, and work quality is decreasing. Less schools, more selection, and more commitment from students would definitely help with that. Then only, thinking about what should be teached would be a real matter.

Just like slow food, slow life or slow parenting, a trend might emerge in design, and might praises the benefits of getting things done slower. I encountered the “slow life” movement two years ago in Italy, when the love for the “dolce vita” might have inspired some people to get “slower”. No need to say that life around our over-connected societies is nothing but a fast-food chain for everything. Deadlines, clocks, real-time social medias: our day is filled with time pressure. But that might ruin your creativity in the long term…

DOING FASTER IS NOT NECESSARILY DOING BETTER

As a matter of fact, the contrary is true most of the time. Graphic design in a mind process, and more than the technical time needed to accomplish a task, it’s the thinking you’ll need the most. Being head first in a project for a short period of time doesn’t help you seeing flaws in a design. You don’t have time to refine the details, or worse, to explore new paths as they come along your thinking forks.

Forcing designers to work too fast on a complicated project, as identity work or complex layout design, is a waste of time for both clients and designer. It ensures frustration and low quality work most of the time..

LETTING THINGS SIT MIGHT BOOST YOUR CONFIDENCE

When you’re not entirely satisfied with a design, having some time to put it aside and come back later gives you a fresh vision of your work. Structure and contrasts become clearer, and soon enough, you might be able to produce some high ranking work. Which might not have been possible if you forced your way around it in order to finish quickly. Result: less frustration, a fresh view, and a free ego boost when you finally come up with something completely finished and polished.

NOT SHOWING A WORK AT FIRST MIGHT GIVE SOME RESULT

Trust your own design process and take some time to design for yourself, and yourself only. Showing everything you do at earlier stage can ruin a design. Not that an extra pair of eyes is not useful at time, but being given advices too early might make you doubt about your creative choices. People can’t have the exact same vision as you have. The final product might be better than they  expected it to be in the first stages: trust your instincts, and keep some work under cover from time to time.

WORKING SLOWER DOESN’T MEAN NOT WORKING EFFICIENTLY

It’s not because you’re allowing time for the creative process that you’re discarding everything from deadlines to productivity. It’s just like praising quality over quantity: know your pace, allow for having multiple yet interesting projects at the time, but especially take care about your methodology. We don’t talk about procrastination here, but about researches and process.

Of course, all those pieces of advices have small to no chances to reach a standard workplace. As much as banishing workaholics, having a 4-day week or washing away long and inneficients meeting for that matter.  It’s all about stopping to think about the design industry as a business, but about a real craft.
Don’t get me wrong here — I ain’t no utopist: during my day job, having a whole week to design a website layout (clients corrections included) is pure luxury — I know it’s not something we’ll reach by tommorow. But when working on my own, I’m definitely slowing it down, enjoying every single minute of it. and I hope you too, sometimes, do the same.

Creatives are creatures of habits, or so I heard.

You set up your work plan everyday the same way, probably doodling on your moleskin or making lists of any sorts. You can’t get the creative enlightenment until you’ve set up the right music in your headphones. You can’t start a day without having a cup of coffee — and that’s not just a metaphor. Your creativity is tightly tied to your daily routine. Because being creative is a process that needs triggers to be pulled and buttons to be pushed.

Ever read all those posts about the habits of highly creative-people, or the healthy freelancer’s habits? In substance, they’re all the same instant-motivating claim to make you work more efficiently. Which is good, sure. But like new year’s resolution about eating healthy and run 25 miles a week, it’s highly unlikely that you will really set up your work pace on a ready-made solution.
The real trick is not choosing good habits and goals to attain — it’s actually setting them up in your already overcrowded daily schedule.

Don’t try to do everything at once.
Surfing on your good-will tidal wave, you’re trying to set new goals for your productivity. Like blogging everyday, doing some fitness, creating a new piece of art everyday, stop smoking and learning 3D, video and maybe taking a drawing class. Be honest, even if the more you do, the more you have time to do it, you cant manage everything at once. Choose one or two thing you really want to stick to, and don’t let it go.

Plan ahead.
When setting up goals, you have to have a specific plan in mind — otherwise, you’ll end up in a big mess of stuff. Yes, stuff. Important and non-important stuff, all in a boiling soup, where you can’t remember what once was the real important thing to do.
So plan, make lists, and then order. I ain’t no GTD addict but I find tht if I organize calmly what I have to do in nice lists, it makes it feel almost good. Especially the part when you can scribble madly over a task done. Plan goals for the day, for the week, and for life. Some of the idea might be crazy, but you’d be surprised author much effective they could become.

Time is your best friend and worst ennemy.
Taking on an habit is really a matter of time — that’s quite easy to understand. Not only does it take time, but it also needs to maturate in order to be highly effective.
Take some time to think about your goal. Set up a starting date and enjoy every minute of anticipation, telling yourself how much you’d love to achieve this. And it’ll make you shiver with anticipation.
On a second hand, set up a definite time to achieve the bastard, errr this marvelous goal — I heard a month is the standard, but really, it depends on you — and get to work. Be realistic tho, so you won’t be frustrated in the end. As we all know, a frustrated creative is no more than a fierce ball of hate. You don’t want to be that, don’t you?

Reward yourself, because others won’t.
If, by any chance, you really went jogging 3 times a week for a month, or better, finally put up the pieces to make a shiny brand new portfolio… Give yourself a reward. You can never get enough pleasurable stuff in a life, and treating yourself with a little bit of love is always appreciated. This can also be used with everyday chores and tasks: having a coffee, smelling fresh laundry, taking a hot bath, or whatever tickles your fancy (and who am I to judge?) might make the unlikeable become a reflex. Think Sheldon and Penny on Big Bang Theory. Or more simply, think how you would educate a dog. Not that I’m saying you’re a dog. I’m saying you can easily trick yourself into being one.
NB: This doesn’t work for shoes. Even if you can”t have too many shoes, you should resist the urge to buy some all the time.

Look at the mirror.
The best way to identify you strengths and weakness in that case is to look carefully at your daily routine.
We all have productivity peaks at various times of the day. Identify those time zones and concentrate your efforts on those specific moments. No need to plan a daily drawing session at 9P.M if you know you’ll be starving at that time. Contrary to what those motivating lists seem to say, we’re not machines. We can’t change in a week, and we do need to eat and sleep from time to time.
Respect your own internal body clock and don’t push yourself too far — it only leads to trouble.

Keep it real.
Having high expectations is wonderful. And even if it makes not the whorl go round, some people achieved great things by having wonderful habits. But well, this is real life. You can’t be a super-hero all the time. Let it go. You will fail sometimes, and will probably need several tries before heading for success. Keeping the unimportant tasks real and the mattering stuff a bit crazy is probably the best way to keep your head & self-esteem safe.

Now about choosing which habit you oughta take… That’s up to you. No matter what you think will help you getting on top, as long as you have fun, it’s okay. Enjoy, and don’t harm yourself in the process. This is the best habit you can have.

Love and ampersand,
Zélia

Ps: a little game. I’ve hidden two stupid Rocky Horror Picture Show quotes in there. Could you find them?