Comments on: Formal Education in Web Design

By: John

John — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:37:32 +0000

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..

By: Sam Design

Sam Design — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:24:24 +0000

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.

By: beth

beth — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:41:27 +0000

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.

By: HeavyGod

HeavyGod — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:00:12 +0000

Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!

By: Deanna

Deanna — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:32:39 +0000

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.

By: Cleveland Web Design - Brad Colbow » Blog Archive » Time to Update the Blog

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:28:50 +0000

[…] Beth Dean got me thinking about web design and formal education. […]

By: beth

beth — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:20:46 +0000

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.

By: Jen

Jen — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:59:58 +0000

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.

By: Brad C

Brad C — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:38:10 +0000

I agree with what Patrick said. In design like any other field it’s passion for your work that will ultimately push you ahead.

By: Brad C

Brad C — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:35:30 +0000

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.