I don’t know about you, but any art classes or design classes that I took in college were amazing yet unsatisfying at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong: I could never have made it without beginning design classes where we learned about alignment, repetition, font-choice, etc.
And (on most days) I wouldn’t trade my upper-level classes where the professors heavily critiqued your work almost to the breaking point all in hopes to make you a better designer.
But after I graduated from the University, I learned that there were some key things I wish I had known about the business of design.
Lessons my design professors almost never mentioned.
And important skills I’ve noticed a lot of designers struggle with.
So today, I’d like to discuss 10 critical lessons your design professor never taught you. (PS, if I’m totally off the mark and you had a completely different college experience, please leave a comment and let me know. PPS: I should also mention that I had an excellent college experience and learned billions of great life lessons. Here I’m referring exclusively to my design classes. And I’d love to hear what you have to say too.)
5 critical lessons your design professors never taught you
Lesson 1: Clients pay the bills, but the customer’s not always right.
When I started out as a designer, I thought that the client had the final say on any work you do.
And in some cases, that’s true.
But I quickly learned that our entire existence is not solely for the purpose of designing what the client thinks is best. In fact, I think it’s one of the biggest myths of graphic and web design.
If you position yourself correctly, you can establish a partnership with your client where they will respect your decisions and opinion. At that point, you become more than just a monkey with a Wacom tablet. You become a true designer.
Lesson 2: You don’t have to present your design process when presenting your designs.
This was a lesson that took me a little time to learn. In many of my classes we all sat around discussing the “why” behind our design before we ever revealed the final result.
I’ve since learned that this provides a false experience both for you and for your viewers. I won’t rant long here since I just wrote a whole post on this topic. Read it here:
“Why I never explain my designs before revealing them to my client”
Lesson 3: You don’t have to have decades of experience to land some great design gigs.
I always got the impression from many of my design professors that I would have to suffer through many years of low-paying design jobs before I really “made it” and got to start working on fun, lucrative projects.
That’s simply not true.
You are the owner of your own destiny.
And you can make things happen now if you want them bad enough.
Clients aren’t always looking for designers with decades of projects under the belt. Here’s the truth about what clients look for in a designer.
Lesson 4: Your elevator pitch is as important (or more important) than your design portfolio.
Finding new clients can be really hard. In fact, it’s one of the most requested topics here at GDB.
And one thing that got hammered into my head as a design student was the importance of polishing my design portfolio on a regular basis.
But no one ever told me that I needed to prepare an elevator pitch (PS, master your elevator pitch here.) No one ever taught me that I needed to be able to explain my business in 15 seconds or less in order to survive in the business world.
But that’s how it goes. When you’re working on finding clients, you have very little time to make a great impression and capture their business.
So, yes, polish up your portfolio. Put your best foot forward at all times.
And then be ready to explain what you do and why someone should hire you in less time than it takes to ride the elevator to your hotel room.
Lesson 5: Great designers steal.
You don’t have to be a puritan all the time.
You don’t have to have all the great ideas.
And you don’t have to build everything from scratch every day of your working life.
As Cameron Moll put it (ironically, stealing this quote from Picasso sort of): “Great Designers Steal.”
No doubt, clients are going to ask you at least once in your career to copy another designer’s work. (PS: Here’s how to handle that.)
Taking inspiration from other designers is ok. Using templates now and again? Also ok.
As long as you’re not blatantly stealing without giving proper credit (a very unfulfilling way to live life as a designer), then you’re fine.
Explore.
Learn.
Mimmick in an effort to improve.
Soon, you’ll find other designers are copying your work. And you know what they say: imitation is the highest form of flattery.
Did I get it right?
How did I do? Did I get pretty close?
What other key lessons did you fail to learn while you were a design student in college? Leave a comment and grow this list with me!
Great photo from katiew
Written by Preston D Lee Preston is the founder of GDB, a designer, programmer, marketer, and entrepreneur. Follow @prestondlee
I think you got it right! I wasn’t even a design student but ended up designing…so i don’t even know what you would learn. I pick up everything I learn from trial/error, educating myself, and google. Thanks for your insights!
Not only is the customer OFTEN wrong, but, most designers are, ALSO, often wrong. Designers rely, for the most part, on cliches of design. Cliches are just crutches for thjose who can’t do.
Love your articles! Down to earth and practical. Most designers suck at the business end of design, so this really helps – even for the more experienced as things are constantly changing out there.
Great insight and really helpful, your real life experience shows me that I am on the right track.
Awesome article. #4 is a lesson that took me along time to understand, probably 3 years after college. I have an interview with a new client who’s never even seen my portfolio. They are speaking to me based solely on a 1-page pitch I submitted them. I highly recommend anyone uncomfortable in this area, should take a sales methodology training course.
Art schools teach you next to nothing about how to succeed in the real world as a freelance designer. I’ve learned you just have to dive in head first to get started. What university did you go to? Going to a small art school verse a normal university are two totally different experiences.
Spot on. But I have one to add: Keep up with technology. Five years out of college you will feel like a dinosaur if you don’t keep learning new technology. Read blogs, buy books, join AIGA or another group or whatever else works works to keep you motivated to learn more.
I’m not so sure about #5. Is this how most people feel? Inspiration from other’s work is one thing, but we pride ourselves on making from-scratch designs so that all of our clients get a unique and custom design. Do most people feel it’s okay to open yourself to editing templates and things of that nature?
Fantastic post! I was lucky enough to have some business training through my university which got me started on basic building blocks like taking a brief, writing a proposal and communicating Terms and Conditions but I like how your post covers a lot of the personal interaction skills that weren’t discussed in my course and are often learnt over time on the job.
Jennifer, in my current role, I find myself having to rely on stock vector art more than I ever imagined I would as a student. (Much more than when I was freelance, when I did my own illustrations and never used stock layouts.) While ideally I would gather inspiration and come up with something from there, I sometimes have a dozen pressing projects and my inspiration runs dry—not that I have time to even get inspired—and being able to take a template and tweak it is frankly necessary. It also takes a skilled designer to make those templates better, to elevate them to work for your needs. Is that the work I put in my portfolio? Never. But the ugly truth is that I don’t get paid enough or have enough time to create an amazing, completely from scratch design everytime, and more importantly, my clients couldn’t care less.
I think this article was great because it is the reality for many designers that you won’t be able to put your all into every design. I’m striving to reach a point in my career where I can create original, elegant solutions to every design problem, but right now I make compromises that allow me to have a work/life balance. I think honesty is the best policy here; though as a student I think I would have felt like I was “too talented” to ever need a template. I was also “too talented” to wake up before 10:00, so things change!
Totally agree with these especially point two!! Took me a while to realise I couldn’t spend months designing a project and that no-one cared what research/ideas went in, as long as the final design was great!
I also think that what you have said is pretty “right on”. I teach a design class myself at a ‘for profit’ university and I definitely bring up these issues in my own class. Maybe the difference is that I am a business owner first and an instructor second. I actually had my students read your past article about stealing design last week and provide their opinion. I had a great, but lacking college education myself and wanted to instill some critical ideas into my students so that they were not as lost as I was when entering the design world. Unfortunately much of this current student generation isn’t very focused, and there will only be a couple of students in each class that really take away the info I am providing.
I must agree with number one. In the real world where designers would work hard to earn a good reputation, customer’s not always right in our case. And with number 5 maybe it’s not stealing, I guess modifying other designers work, though you have a point on that.
Excellent points, Preston! All of them are fantastic!
Can I add a #6? YOU are responsible for figuring out the details. Too often in class you get a project where all of the details are already hammered out for you. That’s almost NEVER the case in the real world. YOU have to do the digging and asking with the client to find out what they’ve neglected to tell you, and there’s no cheat sheet of what that might be. You also have to beg for files/content you need instead of them being provided.
I found this out hiring a designer right out of college at an in-house job. For every project, he needed his hand held. He couldn’t do a search on the server to find the project files on a super-organized server. He’d just stop and put the project on hold for someone to provide the information he needed instead of reminding them he needed that info and providing a deadline. He didn’t have this nice step-by-step project assignment that his professor usually provided, so he had absolutely no clue how to take charge of a project.
on Lesson 1: Clients pay the bills, but the customer’s not always right.
This is an ideal situation if u were to deal with your client directly.
During my 20 years as a graphic designer, I have being a “monkey with a Wacom tablet” most of the times. I always had to deal with the account manager in our company who just want to please client and made themselves look good.
Point 2 really struck a chord.
Having always subscribed to the explain first reveal second I had talked myself into believing that presenting without rationalising was some how diminishing the experience for the client but this is the real world, not art school!
The client wants the result not the working out – we should be letting them make their own mind up and only be explaining our ideas if asked. Good design is like any good joke (if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny!)
Colour me converted!
Neil,
I love it! Good design is like any good joke – if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny!
Well said!
I agree with all the points above. They all rear their ugly heads at some point throughout your career. I’ve been a graphic designer for over 25 years (hired and fired), and a good handful of those years also include teaching graphics classes at the college level. My teaching style is a very “real world” approach (and charmingly enough, a bit cynical). The one point I would add is that of communication (and every facet of it) 1) Dealing with clients. Seems simple enough, but students need to hone their skills at communicating properly and confidently with their clients. This is not taught. Rather students learn to just do what the teacher tells them. 2) Learning to networking. Just talking to a friend is one thing, but scoring a great paying design gig with a person you met on the elevator is quite different. Confidence is a big part of this. I’m not saying coddling, we’re talking real confidence where you have the guts to even approach that person on the elevator. 3) Communicating with vendors (printers, web gurus, signage companies, etc). If you don’t know how to “talk the talk”, you risk paying through the nose over time for vendors to “fix” things when you could’ve learned to do it right in the first place. Not all of this can be taught to the “T”, but new graphic designers should at least be familiar and aware of certain production nuances so as not nickel and dime a client or themselves.
Students seem to be falsely informed somehow that they will get this degree and they’ll auto-magically get these elusive, high-paying design jobs, which will allow them to work in their fishbowl mac existence and not have to deal with humanity. Humanity IS, technically, their entire purpose — it is humanity that “sees” their work.
One other add-on to this list is students need to learn to problem solve and be more strategic for the long term in their design approach. Will their design work stand the test of time and can it be applied across a variety of mediums? This might be touched on in a class here and there, but it should be pounded into their heads class after class. Repetition will make it stick. They spend too much time pleasing the teacher and not standing up for their work (in essence, what have they learned?)
Sorry ALL, didn’t mean type your eyeballs out of your skulls. I could still go on and on! thanks for reading
When I was at university they told us it was industry standard that we had use Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. We then find out that the computers university didn’t have it on them!
Also we were never taught the different resolutions for web and print!
Lastly university projects are nothing like real world of work.
You missed point #0: Learn about business….. because they sure don’t teach it to you in design school. Learn about the specific type business you are working in. Learn about pricing. Learn about labor costs. Learn about overhead. Learn about bookkeeping. Learn what a contract is and does for you. Learn how to negotiate. If you’re freelance, learn about taxes and payroll.
Even though I own and operate my own modest design firm, I strongly believe that having some understanding of how businesses works will make *anyone* a better, more valuable employee.
For example: how many artists do you know that can’t produce an accurate accounting of their time spent on a project? How on earth can you create an estimate for future projects if you don’t know your expenses on current projects? If you’re an employee, how is the accounting department supposed to bill the client if they don’t know your hours? If you’re freelance, lack of timekeeping leads to discomfort with invoicing, which leads to late or missing invoices…. and late or absent payment. Understanding the business necessity of timekeeping makes it easier to have discipline about doing it.
If I were King, I’d add a class to the senior year of High School called “The Business of Life” and teach stuff about credit cards, insurance, taxes, banking, the importance of savings, retirement, navigating the healthcare system, how write a resume, etc…
Great! Thanks for sharing.
What is your thought or experience on this?
( wondering how most other designers around the world think… )
If the boss / clients’ business / event / product / project
is against your belief / principles / values…
do you still do it / work for them?
Is it that those with strong integrity/values/virtues/principles do not fit in the profession?
Is it that designers’ have to serve whatever bosses/clients (will) pay for?
You’re right on point. Most of what I know about designing was/is self taught, so thanks for the tips. Looking forward to more great tips like these.
Studying design at a university is very different than studying visual arts and design at a studio art school. At the Univ. the non visual arts required classes prevent the student from having enough time to focus on design and image making, both disciplines that are very labor and time intensive. Learning software too, uses up of the precious time that designers need to learn visual arts skills and visual arts ideas. Shaping curriculum for designers should not be done by the visually challenged.
Dead on with #1 — As I tell the people I work with constantly: The client is not always right but they alway have a right to be heard. It comes down to respecting that they understand their business, and we ours, then working together to make the best work. I’d much rather have a client as a partner than a boss.
Good calls on the others, but #2 and 5 are great: If I go to a great place to eat, no way am I going to ask the chef to explain how he did everything! Same with clients; be quiet and let them tell you what they think (they definitely will!) As for imitation, Bruce Mau said it well: Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
Nice article, especially for someone like me, who never attended any school, and always felt I missed out – mainly I’ve missed having a forum to discuss design, play and experiment.
Instead I got my experience hands-on, sales pitches, keeping track of time etc. as a trainee. Looking back now, I see my schooled colleagues
Whoops, tablet glitch
I see my schooled colleagues as less daring, less technically proficient, reliant on a few cliches, when making a sale, and with less interest and understanding in the clients situation.
When I freelanced, I joined a forum for graphic freelancers – also to meet prospective clients – but the designers there, were constantly bickering over others underbidding them, but noone took the time to actually make the sale and explain their worth, or even consider the nature of the clients there.
The same goes for all the tablet monkeys out there, hiding behind their Account Managers. So what, if you don’t get to see the “client”. You’ve got a great advantage, in you only needing