Commerciality
Commerciality
When i was at college my tutors were archaic dinosaurs with little or no concept of the design industry outside the walls of the collge. They thought that despite the advent of the Mac a few years prior, we should still be taught about typesetting using picas and also about how to use a PMT machine.
These tutors allowed us write our own creative briefs so we all ended up producing what we thought was a piece of cutting edge design that was in keeping with what was going on in the outside world. What actually resulted was an unrealistic piece of work that would simply not stand up in a commercial world outside. The work also ended up being incomprehensable and unmarkable by our tutors.
When I started my first job in industry I found myself in a strange situation, having been given a job, but being unusable in the studio. On my first day i was asked if i knew how to use Quark Xpress to which I responsed no, Pagemaker having been the most advanced DTP package that my college had invested in.
I then went through the process of learning all the software and skills needed for me to even be able to reach the status of Junior designer.
A huge void existed in what skills i was taught at college to prepare me for a career in the design industry, and what skills were actually needed for me to serve in a role as a commercially viable Junior designer.
Still to this day 12 years on why is this still happening and who's fault is it? It is the duty of the colleges and design agencies to work closer together to ensure that students are better trained in order to be able to hit the ground running when they join a design agency. The sports industry is an example where grass roots development is taken very seriously and the design industry should be no different. Nurturing and developing talent at grass roots level can only have a positive bearing on our industry. It also might help decrease the drop rate of graduates leaving the industry.
The links between design agencies and colleges are few and far between. Some students are lucky enough to attend colleges where the links to the industry are strong. But not everyone gets these opportunities.
Many of the bigger, well-known or named colleges seem to be the ones that have links with Design agencies. However design agencies are also at fault by only looking to these named colleges and not including lesser known colleges in their hunt for raw talent.
However there is the flip side of the coin. Having worked in the design industry for many years myself and other colleagues are often guilty of approaching projects with our commercial heads on which quite often can lead creativity being restricted by commercial demands of a brief.
So how can we help to bridge this gap.
Getting design agencies to do more talks, tutoring and brief setting at colleges is another avenue to pursue. When i was at college we were tutored in our third year by a talented creative who worked 4 days a week for his design agency and the other day he was employed by the college. His industry based assessment of our off work was probably one of the only things that prevent most of my year from not graduating.
Of course not every design agency can spare an unpaid creative resource once a week, and not every college can afford to pay a industry creative to come in once a week.
National schemes that better links businesses and colleges should be created. A pool of colleges and design agencies who want to be a part of the scheme should be created. Each college would then be assigned a list of design agencies that they would be linked with for the period of one year only to prevent favourite cliques being formed. So allowing lesser colleges the chance to place their students in top design agencies.