When I decided I wanted to be a designer, I was going out on a limb. The year was 1997, and I’d just completed my bachelor’s degree in English, had no design experience, and had only created one (very hideous) web site. Back then, Amazon.com was still in its infancy and I wasn’t even sure there would be a job for me in this “new media” field. What I did know is that visual communication was exciting, I enjoyed tinkering around with HTML, and I was pretty good at learning new technologies.
So, I did what any academically-institutionalized 22-year-old would do; I enrolled in a design certificate program. In the couple of years it took me to complete the program—entirely after-hours since I had a day job—I learned a lot about design and knew that I had a whole lot more to learn. Being a total nerd, and not at all shy in the classroom, I spent a lot of time talking to my teachers and asking questions. I read the books they recommended, then read most of the books in the bibliographies. I made a lot mediocre designs and I made some pretty good ones.
It took me about five years of actively working as a designer to be any good at it. I had to overcome “designer’s block” every time I was confronted with a blank Photoshop document that I was expected to fill with pixels. Developing a ready-made visual vocabulary takes time and experience, and a whole lot of patience and good art direction. If I had tried to be a solo designer straight out of school I’d probably still be a pretty lame designer. Having peers and colleagues to learn from is priceless. Staying in touch with them over the years has lead to great friendships and countless business opportunities. Without all the people I’ve worked with in the last decade, I’d be nothing. They taught me to collaborate, be a team member, be a leader, a thinker, and even a pretty good designer.
Now that I’m a principal at my own little agency, I know it’s my responsibility to give back to the design community and help new designers learn the ropes. Gone are the days of bootstrapping it as a designer and walking in to an agency job with no design training or experience. So I teach. I’ve harnessed the part of me that planned to be a high school English teacher and focus my pedagogic energy on teaching college students. After a year of teaching Flash Essentials at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, I’ve left the certificate program behind and am now an adjunct faculty member at Portland State University.
I’m nearly halfway through my first quarter of teaching Art 440 Interactive Team to undergraduate design majors who want to learn more about how to take a project from start to finish, working with real-world clients. We’re helping three local non-profits create and launch websites, something they couldn’t afford to do with a regular agency. The course is like an internship where someone actually does have time to provide leadership and direction to the interns. Working with students on the hows and whys of a project is just awesome, even if it’s daunting at times. All these things I wished someone could have taught me back in the day I can now pass on based on my experiences. I have the opportunity to help the students become better designers, workers, and teammates through the experience they have in my course. That’s a weighty responsibility!
But I don’t just want to pass on my knowledge of design process and visual communication and client management and usability and technology. I think back on my early jobs and the great people I worked with, and how they fostered my design skills, encouraged me, and shaped me into the design professional I am today. I want to pass on my enthusiasm for design, my curiosity about how things work, my love of being creative for a living. I want to help make a better, more vibrant design community for the future. I want to run into my students in five years and think, “Wow, I want to hire you!”
What difference are you making in your professional community?