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Re: The New Design
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- Date:
- April 14, 2011
Naz Hamid posted a “memo,” The New Design, on Weightshift this morning, that immediately struck a chord and got me thinking. I’ve been to a handful of AIGA portfolio reviews here in Chicago area in recent years, and immediately knew what he was referring to in his description of “one or two interactive projects (self-initiated, for clients or otherwise) essentially buried beneath the good stuff.” While there are invariably some beautiful UI examples presented, more memorable are the portfolios which tack on two or three photoshop layouts wrapped in a Safari frame.
There is another type of UI work being presented by students at these reviews as well though: the outstanding. I have a hard time thinking of actual numbers here, but it seems maybe 1 in 20 of the portfolios I’ll look at might contain “outstanding” interactive work – work that really stands out, even among real world Web sites and applications being developed. But one thing is clear in this work, the students presenting them are passionate about, cognizant of, and in some cases even already quite will acquainted with the technologies required to develop them. Hearing the students talk about work like this is really unlike hearing the students with the best print work speak. They’ve thought out, designed, and in some cases developed, huge chunks of the project—site architecture, user interactions, behaviors. These are the students who are really passionate about interactive work. They understand the value of well-thought out behaviors and UX as much as they understand the importance of good design. These are the kids who understand that the only way to really understand how these interactions work, how they relate, and how they can add to a user experiencing their layout, is to learn how to create them themselves.
Naz’s memo also reminded me of something else – a course offered during my time at Kent, nearly 10 years ago – “An Introduction to Web Design and Programming.” The course taught a lot of the basic principals and practices behind both programming for the Web and graphic design. The class was probably pretty closely divided 50/50 among computer programming majors and graphic design majors. And the coursework was equally split. The idea, I suppose, was to provide students an environment where the two majors could work together, bounce ideas off one another, and learn from each other, all the while introducing them to the basics of each other’s field. It was a valiant attempt, and the very idea of teaching any two groups of people the fundamentals of each other’s discipline in 7 weeks seems a bit overly ambitious, if not impossible. This is by no means a dig at the course. It was nearly 10 years ago, techniques being taught were very well in line with standards based development, and the course was a still in its infancy when I was enrolled (it was only the 1st or 2nd semester offering it, I believe). The accompanying book was also very well done, and even alone would have served as a wonderful starting point for any Web designer at the time. My point in mentioning the course, is that if a majority of the interactive work I see presented in student portfolios is an accurate representation of design schools across the nation, it seems things haven’t come much further in preparing design students to hit the ground running with interactive work upon graduation.
This probably varies a bit from the topic of Naz’s article, as he was addressing new talent that hoped to present itself as more well-rounded – that being a well-rounded designer today requires one to be comfortable working in an interactive medium. While I might more perceive interactive/UI design as a bit of a separate discipline from traditional 2D design – the same foundations, but separate challenges, limitations, techniques, and tools. Differences in semantics aside, one thing is common, there seems to be a lack of individuals coming out of design school with a well-rounded grasp of both interactive and UI design, and the technologies behind it.
So, how can schools better prepare students for a medium that will progress and change, probably before they even present their portfolio to a potential employer? My initial thought was that perhaps it was the professors. Maybe professors with well-rounded design and programming chops weren’t yet available. This seems highly unlikely … actually, damn near impossible. In fact, I wish that wasn’t my first reaction. Maybe then, it’s the dynamism of the field. Perhaps this site, tucked away in the back of this portfolio, that looks like it was created in 1998, actually was. But I know that’s not the case. In my experience, the challenge in creating interactive work in college was just as much (and in many cases more) a struggle to learn the technologies, as it was to create an appropriate, meaningful and solid design. It seemed that maybe then there’s a rift between teaching different disciplines – UI design, information architecture, and data management – while maintaining an appropriate awareness and understanding of the others. The connection is lost, or more likely, never understood.
Then what is the answer? Thinking further about it, perhaps schools should (and perhaps many do now) require more prerequisites for students who wish to pursue (or present) interactive design. Teaching designers about database queries, varying sort algorithms, or mvc framework might be overkill, but perhaps “programming for designers” courses could help visual comm design students better realize the relationship between the information they organize in a layout, and its organization as data on a server. I’m a firm believer in [graphic] design being, at its simplest most base level, the organization of information. And having, out of necessity, continually tried to further my knowledge of programming over the years, I can’t stress the importance of this to interactive designers. I feel a line does need to be drawn. Programmers and designers do need to learn to work together, and this experience in an academic environment could put them ahead of the curve upon graduation. But it’s not necessarily about teaching each other how something is done, but developing an , and an understanding of the relationship between the two fields, and a respect for the work each other does.
From BubbleLand with love (and clean sheets),
Ryan -