Formal Education in Web Design
There’s an ongoing debate in the industry about the validity of formal education in web design. Listening to Andy Rutledge’s podcast this weekend got me to thinking about the role my education has played in my career. I am certainly not qualified to say one way is right and another is wrong, but I can tell about my own experiences from attending a private art college.
Off the bat there’s some distinct advantages to spending 4 years doing nothing but learning about your chosen profession. To begin with, students are forced to learn basic design foundations and principles, including color, light, composition, typography, and technique. You have to learn to crawl before you walk. Too often people starting outside of school skip these steps. Great web design is more than being a master of any one technology or tool, as pointed out by Jeff Croft.
The obsession with technique amongst web designers is something that really, really gets to me. I find it incredibly irritating that some of the world’s most influential “web designers” aren’t really designers at all, but rather CSS gurus or semantic markup studs.
In school, you will learn by repetition. No matter what, if you’re forced to do the same task again and again every day for four years you are going to improve by leaps and bounds. Giacommeti once said something along the lines of everyone has thousands of bad drawings to get out of them. Art school forces most students to get them out in their first two years. You will learn tricks and nuances of the field such as keeping a morgue file, and drawing inspiration from a variety of places. You will be exposed to art outside your interests, learn how to work in groups, and how to brand yourself. You will get used to working within tight constraints and under hard deadlines. Contrary to popular belief art school does not brew creativity. You get rigid assignments until the day you graduate. It’s constraint that fosters creativity.
There’s definite disadvantages too. For starters, it’s expensive. While attending, I thought school was a horrible rip off. The tuition skyrocketed every year, the scholarships available were few and far between. Even after getting a sizable one I graduated with a more sizable chunk of debt. You also have no real world experience unless you begin freelancing or take on an internship. My particular school offered little to no job placement. We had a bulletin board of a few positions and some career placement lady who, as far as I know, never placed anyone. It took most of my friends from school at least a year or two before finding their first “real” design or illustration gig. Some of them never could and wound up becoming art teachers or in bizarre quasi-art related professions.
Private school came with it’s own unique setbacks. It’s much more expensive than a public school. Your money goes to nebulous projects like constructing a giant letter A on campus instead of the 24 hour labs another school might have. I chose a private art school specifically because I wanted to focus all my efforts on art, but had I gone to the state school up the road I would’ve had a huge selection of complementary extracurricular courses to choose from. Had I gone that route I probably would’ve taken a few formal programming courses, and more marketing and business classes. Personally, I feel the rigorous curriculum and quality of instructors outweighs those obstacles. Any art school worth their salt (and don’t let anyone kid you, an honest to gosh art school is totally different than an art school which is the art department of a larger institution) requires the teachers to make a living from their art/design work and not teaching. This is how it’s ensured teachers can practice what they preach and are up to date with the pulse of the design community.
Another difficulty in education is how poor the state of web design education is. Most schools don’t know how to offer this. It will often be a few complementary courses to a design degree. Or maybe it’s a bare bones no design HTML class in a computer science department. When disguised as some type of “new media” major it often forgoes essential design fundamentals. The chances of being taught web standards are slim, and some programs are almost exclusively Flash. Chances are you’re going to learn more about the down and dirty of actually building a site from A List Apart than any institution for higher learning.
I do see two obvious drawbacks to not having gone to design school. First, without a degree you start out with no credentials. Sometimes this doesn’t matter, but in a sea of people claiming to be web professionals, wielding a dusty copies of FrontPage 98, this can help immediately set you apart. We’re taught a strong portfolio is our best asset. A good portfolio is crucial, but in applying for a job at a large company or through a job site a resume is the first thing potential employers see.
Secondly, designers learn by imitation, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I learned to draw by copying Clifford the Big Red Dog. I learned to draw comics by copying them. I got to art school and we copied master paintings, our favorite illustrators, and photographs. We learn about building websites in part by deconstructing them and copying the code and techniques. Most people get all the imitation out of their system in school. Without school as a sandbox for experimentation and personal artistic development we’re forced to do it on our own time, or on our clients’ time. In his podcast, Andy Rutledge talks about how web design doesn’t teach design fundamentals. I can’t agree with this enough.
The most consistent criticism I have of web designers without a formal background is they often suffer from Web 2.0 syndrome. They’re still learning how to design, and they’re learning by copying what they see. Web design is a relatively new field, so we don’t have a vast canon to draw from. Traditional design education teaches us to think outside of this box (or monitor) and really understand design as a whole, and design within context.
However, there’s plenty of great web designers who didn’t formally study design. Some of them were programming majors. Some just learned about design on their own time. In the end, only motivation can make you a great designer. One thing which rings true no matter what, is you only get what you give. I had classmates who never did their assignments, or ignored instructors’ criticisms and they graduated with the same portfolio they entered with. Similarly, anyone can figure out how to code and start building websites. If you’re passionate, you’ll take the time to teach yourself about design and grow. A lot of people say “I’m not a visual designer” and use that as an excuse to go about building semantically perfect, hideous websites. I call bullshit. Some people are born artists, but design is learned. Design skills come from practice, experience, criticism and a willingness to learn.
A degree doesn’t matter, what you learned while getting it (or not getting it) does. In this technical day and age most employers only care about who can get the job done, not a piece of paper. I encourage all web designers to ingest as much information about traditional design (particularly typography) as they can. It’s the only way we’re going to bring the web to the same standard as print is held.
On paper I have a formal degree, in reality I’m 98% self-taught.
I started off in the graphic design program but transferred to the technology program because in the graphic design program, the web design classes were Dreamweaver/Flash classes. In the technology program the classes were theory classes. Ironic eh?
But even though I’m almost completely self-taught, I never could have done it without going to college.
And, (if I may ramble for a minute) I also never should have finished college, I got offered a job at a startup in Nevada right beforemy last semester for more money than I make now, and choose to finish my degree. But that’s a story for another day.
I now think there’s little substitute for real world experience, but I would’ve made the same decision you did.
I think working in-house or with an agency is a great option for someone who decides to pursue design but without a degree. You’ll learn from your peers and probably have some excellent experienced creative directors. When I worked at WhiteSpace I learned so much from the owner about design in general. You definitely don’t gain this kind of experience in freelance work where it’s just back and forth with your client.
In a perfect world I think all design/visual communication/media programs should require an internship as part of their curriculum. That’s the one thing I would’ve changed about my own education, I definitely would’ve saught one of these out.
I’m finishing up my undergraduate degree in Interactive Media, which is kind of an ambiguous program, at James Madison University. It incorporates digital video, web design, and even a little journalism to give a hodge-podge of experience. Unfortunately, I think that’s it’s biggest drawback. They’re trying to clean it up some and make it more focused, but that won’t be complete until after I graduate.
If I could rearrange my curriculum, I’d have an even split of classical design based classes and technical code based classes. One of the most useful classes I’ve taken in college was Design Methodology. It’s not required for my major, but it’s helped tremendously. I also wish I had instruction on basic database programming and javascript. I’ve had to teach myself what I know about these topics, and they’re pretty tough to dive right into without any experience.
I believe that personal motivation is the key to being successful in school and (hopefully) post-graduation. I’m using my time at school to get as much experience as I can and prepare myself for a career. If I was just doing the bare minimum class assignments I have no doubt that finding a job after graduating would be extremely difficult. Some of my classmates aren’t doing the same and I think that’s really going to set them back. Just reading some popular design blogs will put you miles ahead. Doing some freelance work for on campus organizations/individuals will push you even further. I also learned a lot about the web design industry working in-house over the summer. Pushing yourself and getting experience help the most.
JMU is a public school and I’ve had to take a lot of classes not related to my major at all, but I think they’ve helped to make me well rounded. I can see the benefits to going to a private art school though.
I definitely agree with what was said in this post.
There is a lot to chew on there.
I majored in advertising in the late 90s, we didn’t know the internet from a hole in the ground. I did minor in Graphic Design at Kent and I came out of school feeling much more confident as a designer than I did as copywriter. When I started the design program it was all about copy machines, exacto knives and rubylith which was already out of date at that point. So me and all my fellow students taught ourselves Photoshop.
Looking at it from that angle I could make a case that school didn’t matter much in the long run, but I do think it was really important. I did get a very good foundation in design. To this day when layout isn’t going well I think back to my first GD class where the teacher drilled concepts like balance, alignment, hierarchy and contrast into our heads. And the critiques were brutal, but because of those there is nothing a client can say to me about a design that will hurt my feelings.
At my last job one of my responsibilities was finding interns and sorting through portfolios of job applicants. I was always looking for those basic elements of design. Somebody at Akron U must have found a set of floral brushes and passed them out to every student in the program. You can make your design shiny and slick but you can’t fake the underlying structure.
I agree with what Patrick said. In design like any other field it’s passion for your work that will ultimately push you ahead.
I’m not exactly a full-fledged web designer, at least to my mind - it’s only a part of my work, and I didn’t have any formal education in it at all. I was a computer science major at a liberal arts college. But I was always naturally artistic and interested in design (I went down the compsci path just to be contrary, because I tend to do things like that), so web design has always been a good way for me to marry the two.
I might have focused more on web and graphic design education if worthwhile courses in it were offered at my school. Unfortunately, what they did offer in that vein was laughable. I think the entire field is still so new that the structure of good teachers and courses is not yet in place. In that case, it’s almost necessary for some designers to teach themselves. Maybe once our generation of designers gets to teaching others, we’ll see some improvement in web design education.
Jen I think you’re absolutely right.
[…] Beth Dean got me thinking about web design and formal education. […]
I went to your school, I think we might have had a class together. I totally agree with this post, and I am in a “bizarre quasi-art related profession” right now, designing aerosol can labels. I’m miserable!!! I’m glad I went there but I wish someone would have slapped me in the face when I decided to study computer animation with no intention to leave Cleveland.
Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!
Deanna, small world! I seem to know very few people from our alma mater who are doing exactly what they studied. Perhaps this is the nature of college in general, or the commercial art field? We start in one direction and stumble across something else we like along the way.
I feel the best way for a designer to learn something is to learn it off of their own back and develop their own style, I feel that if you were to learn it completely in a school like environment you wouldn’t be able to produce as unique work.
Most clients and web design companies will choose a good portfolio over a formal education certificate.
I liked the story so I cribbed some of it for an article.
This story had some of what makes a good story. There was a lot of feeling and a real passon for the business. The art is Kick Ass..
Personally, I use FP2003 but it can’t do anything like this.
This is great..