More and more I hear influential people talking about graduating college as a waste of time. There are even “scholarships” for not attending college. I think this is the wrong direction to go and here are my five reasons why a designer should graduate a college or university.

1 – Open your mind

The new “don’t waste time on college” crowd often refers to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as examples of successful entrepreneurs, which dropped out of college. But these are just exemptions from the rule. Most of the people are not “early birds” and they don’t know yet what is the right direction in a certain business field. As for designers – the examples of designers who attended colleges and became successful are far greater then the self taught ones. Most designers who graduated college will say that the college was a waste of time and not so helpful, but this is a distorted impression. While technique can be easily self-taught, the mindset a design course in college can give you is not. It opens your mind when you are immersed for the first time with a big group of people interested in the same topics, as you are – an effect with long lasting effects.

2 – Learn something different (e.g. business)

You can study something non related to design if you think you can learn the craft by yourself in a better way or if you cannot find an appropriate design course close to you. Maybe you get your inspirational talks in meet ups or at conferences. A successful designer is also a business man. If you want to become a freelancer or own a creative studio you may consider study business. If you are interested into sociological problems and want to design for that area you can study sociology. Can you see the pattern? Get a degree.

3 – You need it to work outside your country (visa)

This is one of the most important reasons to get a degree. The world today requires people to move around the world. You may work your whole life in the EU or in the US, but maybe not. The visa and labor laws are not as flexible as you might think and having a degree is a huge advantage – really it often makes up 50% of your changes to get a work permit in other countries. The type of specialization is not so important – actually a normal business degree is the most widely accepted.

4 – You have achieved something

It might seem silly that a successful designer goes back to college in his mid 30s just to finish the college. But I know more than one designer who actually did that. They all told me that they missed something. They had the feeling to have failed by not completing their studies. I myself can relate to this because I didn’t start my college education right away. I worked five years before I started and every time one of my friends finished university in the meantime I felt a little sting. I was working and was advancing in my position, felt successful, but something was missing, especially when I talked to other designers / developers at the time. It may be a European thing, but self-taught is never canonical.

5 – You can work for Google

Many companies have strict rules about what education a person must have to be part of their “ecosystem”. You think that this is discriminating, because you cannot rate a value of an employee based on education levels. You might be right, but these rules are part of the culture of a company and often part of guidelines to avoid discrimination and favoritism. So if you can foresee for the rest of your life that you will never want or have to become part of an organization where they have this kind of rules go ahead and don’t get a degree.

Conclusion

The time invested in education is never wasted. You can lay the ground for a career in multiple ways, getting a degree is one of the better ways and opens more possibilities.

Who would you like to be, a Swiss army knife or a forged Japanese kitchen knife? Both have great “skill” sets and have been on the market a long time. One is a generalist, a tool with many features which can be used in many ways. You can cut, open cans, … you name it, but all features are compromised in functionality a little bit in order to fit in a knife, you will have a hard time cutting sushi with it. The Japanese kitchen knife on the other hand is great for cutting raw fish for sushi and sashimi – but fails when you want to open a can.

In graphic design we have the same problem. Should a graphic designer become a generalist or a specialist? Print and web design, or specialize on social media. Dig deep into php programming or have just the right understanding of the technology?

Management gurus around the world write books where they postulate one year “only who specializes survives”, and the next year “the generalist is the fittest for survival”. How can this be?

In reality there is often space for both the generalist and the specialist – like in the knife metaphor I’ve made. The Japanese knife can survive because it’s niche (cutting) is wide enough. A specialist who chooses a too narrow niche will fail in the long run – just imagine, who would need a knife for dinosaur meat today?

It is good to be specialist when…

• A new technology you master becomes popular
• Complicated solutions require in-depth knowledge
• There are only a few specialist in your field

It is better to be a generalist when…

• Technologies change very often
• You have gained your wide range of experiences through real world projects
• Most of your clients need personalized solutions achievable with standard tools
• You cover a wide range of clients and projects
• You are in a leading position and have to oversee many different aspects beyond one specific field
• You know specialist you can hire when things need a specialist

Should you hire a generalist or a specialist?

In my opinion generalists are especially for smaller agencies and companies the better fit as full time employees. Specialist can be contracted to do special jobs. As an employer you want a motivated and flexible staff. It is far easier to move a generalist to another field, than to lay off a specialist and search for a new specialist.

This is even truer in today’s internet times. Let’s take “social media experts”. Many of those social media specialists master the technology behind Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. but lack the marketing background and design experience. Successful campaigns are not just about one channel.

Web technologies are even worse. Frameworks and programming languages are growing exponentially in number and complexity. Mobile applications, the new hype, is just as bad. iOS need C++ (a special version obviously), Android Java, Windows Phone 7 C# (speak C sharp). Let’s be honest, it’s a mess.

You can see, unless you specialize in that area, that especially for programming jobs (and web site programming as well) are best done by specialists on contract.

Foto curtesy by capcase

If you are asking this question, then the answer is “no”. Your ask why? I will tell you.

You are never in the position to ask this question and if you do, you are not worthy for any client because you are too arrogant. Simple isn’t it. I’m inspired to write this through Seth Godin, the word “deserving” is really huge and in today’s business world I would never use this word. The only phrase, and it is a phrase, I would say is ok with this word is “Everyone gets the client he deserves.” There is much truth in this saying and you should be aware of it from time to time.

Foto by Stephen Poff

People getting to work in the creative business often don’t are aware of how many times they must come up with an idea for a project. No matter how big or small a job is there is some creativity involved. Most people think that creativity is some magical thing that creative people have, and others don’t – the ideas come naturally from somewhere inside of their mind. But how can anyone relay on something magical to do business. And how can you avoid having a stall? Here some insights and tips.

Creativity is not about inventing things

First of all, what is creativity? We consider that something is creative if we haven’t seen anything like it before. But if we have a closer look we might say better – We consider something creative if no one before has thought doing it this way. This difference is important – it reframes the mindset. It means that some really creative can be achieved by using things and techniques already “invented” and use them in a different context. So you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but you can use it a way nobody else has used it before.

A very nice example is the work of a graphic design graduate. She made a small book with poems – the theme of the poems was about traditional living in the mountains. There is an old embroidery-culture bound to this living and so she didn’t “print” the book, but she had the text be stitched on cotton and cord the cotton-pages together. It looked like a book and it worked like a book, but it was different. Neither the stitching, the cotton, the book form where invented by he. Even stitching text on cotton is nothing new, but bringing it together to form a book was the creative act.

Creativity is not an coincidence

If we convey, that creativity is bringing together existing things to form something new, then we have to know the existence of the “things”. If you are interested in a broad range of topics you will have not many problems finding techniques, materials, styles, knowledge from different cultures together. If you are just interested in product design, graphic design, illustration, photography or something else specific you may be the best technically speaking, but you will lack on real creativity. You might have heard about the famous “Get a life!” spoken by William Shattner at a Star Trek convention to the attending crowd. It meant getting out of the narrow perspective of a geek into the interesting broadness of life. Now I tell you “Get interested in everything!” – You don’t have to know everything exactly about everything, but try to know that it’s there. You never know if the way a certain flower looks like or how handcrafted wheels where made will be useful to you in the future, but if you know that there was a special technique behind the wheel making you might apply it to making a mailing out of paper.

The pool of knowledge you gather this way can then “on demand” be accessed through the various creativity techniques. Brain Storming, Leathering, Mind Mapping are just tools. You need raw material to build something and in the creative business the raw materials are all around you. So collect them and use them.

In the next part I will tell you how to use and collect this ideas in an art director way.

I found in a strategy presentation of a client a few nice inputs. Most of the time we stand in our own way because we don’t think like winner. There is a lot of literature about having success and so forth, but you can boil it down to this: Reframe

And here some examples:

Foto by marthax

Every graphic/online/media designer nowadays calls himself an art director (or worse Information Architect). Even the Wikipedia, the new holy grail of knowledge states, in a little confusing manner. Find out what is the difference between a graphic designer and an art director and what it takes to become one.

Despite the title, an advertising art director isn’t necessarily the head of an art department…

Well, let’s get straight to the point – if you do not “direct” at least a team, may it be of internal co-workers or external partners in a project, then you are probably not an art director. You might be a very good graphic designer, photographer, art-buyer, copy-texter,  image retoucher, layouter, producer,  but not an art director. Let me explain why.

Art directors are team players

An art director must have a good knowledge of the above capabilities. He must understand them, he has not to excel in them, but know how to use them accordingly. If he is not the best photographer for the job, he has to know who is and this not only by capabilities, but also according to the budget.

In smaller firms, most of the time the budgets are tight and therefore the graphic designer takes also the pictures and writes the headlines, looks over the production, printing … While this can result in very good quality for small projects, it also has on big pitfall. The outcome is limited to the capabilities and style of one person.

The Art director on the other hand,  has to have the big picture in his head, know where the whole production is heading to. Setting the style and tone for the project and is not limited to only his capabilities.

Step by step

Obviously there are not only the extremes – on the path from being a graphic designer to become an art director are many steps, where duties may vary and overlap. But the important thing to know is that the mindset changes when you are no longer only a graphic designer. You think differently and approach projects differently.

How to achieve this different mindset will be shown in the next lessons – little by little.