Heller - The Education of a Graphic Designer

Copyright 1998, 2005, 2015 by Steven Heller

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Cover and interior design by The Collected Works

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-62153-483-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62153-493-8

Printed in the United States of America.

Table of Contents

By Steven Heller

By Andrea Marks

By Meredith Davis

By Frank Baseman

By Gunnar Swanson

By Gunnar Swanson

By Ken Garland

By Leslie Becker

By Liz Danzico

By Vronique Vienne

By Victor Margolin

By Kenneth Hiebert

By Elizabeth Resnick

By Paul J. Nini

By Rob Giampietro

By Chris Pullman

Steven Brower

By Marian Bantjes

By Roy R. Behrens

By Scott Santoro

By Alice Twemlow

By Meredith Davis

By Prasad Boradkar

By Hank Richardson

By Ellen Mazur Thomson

By Virginia Smith

By Richard Hollis

By Kerri Steinberg

By Leslie Atzmon

By Rob Giampietro

By Nancy Mayer

By Andrew Blauvelt

By Johanna Drucker

By Rick Poynor

By William Longhauser

By Chris Pullman

By Steven Heller

By Susan Agre-Kippenhan and Mike Kippenhan

By Jeffrey Keedy

By Chuck Byrne

By Carla Diana

By Katie Salen

By Max Bruinsma

By Michael Worthington

By Michael Rock

By Warren Lehrer

By Ellen Lupton

By Thomas Brigggs

By Richard and Judith Wilde

By Thomas Wedell and Nancy Skolos

By Lama Ajeenah

By Chris Pullman

By Leslie Atzmon

By Sagi Haviv

By Michael Golec

By Danny Lewandowski

By Heather Corcoran

By Mark Kingsley

By Robert Appleton

By Colin Berry

By Ellen McMahon and Karen White

By Audrey Bennett

By Katherine McCoy

By Steven Heller

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Rhodes, president of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) New York, and Tad Crawford, publisher of Allworth Press, for their continued support and encouragement with this long-running Education of series. The Education of a Graphic Designer was the first (and at the time the only) title and now it is in its third edition.

For this, I owe a debt to all the educators who so generously contributed to this and the previous editions. Their respective commitments to designers and design education makes this a valuable document for student and teacher alike.

I also am grateful to my colleagues at SVA MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur, Lita Talarico (co-chair), Esther Ro-Schofield, and Ron Callahan for everything theyve added to our design students lives.

Thanks to Justin Colt and Jose Fresneda of The Collected Works for their wonderful design work.

And to Louise Fili for keeping me educated.

Steven Heller

Introduction: Much Left to Learn

Steven Heller

There is, I believe, a Hollywood movie analogy for just about everything. Take Gravity, the 2013 Oscar Awardwinning film about how even the most highly educated operator of the most technologically advanced flying machine in the universe can be bollixed by garbage. The greatest threat to life and limb is all that supersonic flying junk sent into the atmosphere in the name of technology and commerce. Gravity is a parable about the future of graphic design, which is at the mercy of technological and commercial innovations beyond its current control.

So massive are these changes that how to educate designers for the present, no less the future, can be as complicated as when Gravity s Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), the wise old-middle-aged astronaut, attempts to get Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) back to Earth in one piece after she was cut adrift from her space station by hurtling satellite debris.

Like space junk, are digital medias smashing into old verities of graphic design? Designers, by and large, have more expert techno skill sets, but at what expense? UX and data viz designers are in more demand by industry when it comes to pushing data into digital space, which raises the question of how best to impart knowledge and what knowledge should indeed be imparted to students of these disciplines. Is fine typography and expert image direction and manipulation still the primary directives they once were? Or is code the new type? Can design be judged by time-honored aesthetic standards or is what we call graphic design destined to be viewed through anti-aesthetic lenses?

I wrote in the introduction to the second edition of this book in 2005:

Design pedagogy long ago moved out of the proverbial one-room schoolhouse onto a labyrinthine campus of departments and workshops awarding degrees and honors. In fact, considerable time has gone by since the formal word pedagogy was substituted in certain circles for the more pedestrian (though straightforward) teaching. Which is not a complaint, mind you, but an observation that design education has a lofty status now. It means that in many institutions it is no longer adequate to simply have a marketable portfoliograduates must acquire bona fides through internships, apprenticeships, work studies, and anything else that bulks their rsums. They must have certificates, diplomas, degrees, awards, and scads more evidence that they are designers with a capital D rather than mere mouse-pushers.

Still, there is a lot more to learn about capital D graphic design since 2005. This third edition of The Education of a Graphic Designer examines the field as it was, is, and may even become. Since 2005, competitive trans-media programs have proliferated in schools large and small, especially in the postgraduate space. Indeed, more postgraduate programs are available that provide integrated programs, many of which emphasize the current marriages of technology, business, and strategy with traditional and new design disciplines. The job market is hungry for designers who know the new tools and old skills. For instance, writing and research are increasingly more integral to a well-rounded career.

Unlike degree programs for professions governed by established standards and standardized tests (i.e., law, medicine, engineering, psychology, economics), I wrote in the second edition, graphic designwhich does not, and perhaps may never, necessitate board-tested certificationhas very few strict curriculum conventions and hardly any blanket requirements (other than knowing the computer and being fluent in type). Basic undergraduate design programs offer more or less the same basic courses, but levels of teaching excellence vary between institutions. More and more, I hear that teachers, particularly faculty who are practicing designers, want to be part of institutions where the students have proven levels of skill and talent. Time is too short to simply tutor those who either cannot or will not achieve what might be described as a new standard of design proficiency. The new requisites for designers (and the definition thereof) demands that standards be established. Some of the contributors to this edition overtly and covertly address what they should be.