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From school into the business
Going through design school is a great place to how to design properly, but it teaches you nothing about having a job in design.
It comes down your experience and the type of person you are.
One of my professors said "Your portfolio alone is not going to get you a job, it's going to get you a conversation with a person that is seeing if he/she wants to hire you.” He is absolutely right. When you are a student there is so much emphases on your work that you get very attached to it and want to show it to the world in hopes of it landing you a job. But once you are out of school you realize that good design work is very common, and suddenly your portfolio that you worked so hard on doesn't seem so special anymore. There is plenty of pretty work out there; it is more about the person that did it.
Learning to work for a client is something only first hand experience can teach you.
When I was in design school, I spent a lot of time on the development and exploration of my ideas. You brainstorm, sketch, and experiment in different directions and see how far you push your concept. Learning the process is more important than the final product. It's quite the opposite when working on a client's time. Rarely are they going to pay for you to play around with ideas. Normally, they already have the idea and they only what you to make it—that's it. Having ideas flowing out of you ears is great, but sometimes you have to put on the 'design blinders' because they are paying for a professional.
When joining a company, it is so important to learn how everyone functions as a whole.
Lots of companies in the design industry are built on a very personal and custom business model. It’s a very organic environment and what works in one shop, won’t always work at another. Because you work so closely with people you need pay attention and make sure the chemistry is good and that you are building positive relationships. Creative people in general, especially designers, can be stubborn and it’s easy to start slipping into the mindset that your ideas and methods are the best. That’s fine if you are working on your own projects, you should think that they are awesome, but you are part of a team and there might be a possibility that somebody knows how to do something better than you.
Design school is very much about you and your own growth. It can show you things that you never thought you could do. Working for a company is when things start to fall into place and all that hard work in school starts to pay off.
Posted by Wes Hare on Wednesday, June 02, 2010 in 0 Comments| Share
