as to what i would do if i ran my own design course….throw them to the wolves….get a few clients and have them deal with the client directly, in school one thing that we never quite got is that designers do not design for themselves and that every client is a world to themselves.

I would have more research in planning for product design creation. Who is the market? What are the demographics of that market? What has that market been interested in the past and present in?

Color theory. I believe color theory should be explored in REAL DEPTH.

Graphic design isn’t really painting and coloring pretty pictures but there needs to be more information and practice especially with the new features that CS5 has to offer such as in Photoshop. How can you be really creative if you have no ideas of your own and they are all from the internet or your immediate surroundings? I can Photoshop your own ideas!

Most graphic design students end up in a print related field. But have to start at the very bottom of the totem pole because graphic design students are not able to actually use a PRESS AT SCHOOL. Outdated, will be outdated too fast, too expensive and to expensive to maintain, setup takes to long, cleanup takes to long and so on……… I want to see a school with a new state of the art high speed print setup that works with either blanks or rolls of paper. WHY PAY 100K TO GET A JOB THAT STARTS AT MINIMUM WAGE BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO EXPERIENCE ON A PRINT PRESS. (sry that one just really pisses me off!!)

There are of course more things I would add as I am a few weeks from graduation and am experiencing first hand what needs to be changed but maybe I’ll save that for another time!

All in all, “Individuality” would be the important part of my course, to let them know that nobody is or does the same thing, cause in my opinion “standart” or “normality” is your design-death. And it’s important to be and work individual from the first step of a design-career :)

One of the key things was:

I would let the students know how they can improve there chances of getting in, CV’s, portfolios and such like.

And also I would bring in an industry professional or two to talk with them.

Now when I was thinking this I was a commercial web designer working for a pretty large company so I volunteered to come along, and it went down very well, I think the students really got a feel for what I was saying.

On the back of this I was offered to come and teach industry standard web design, rather than having my students rely on Dreamweaver; I taught them how to hand code, and think their ideas out, I covered wire-framing, sketching, inspiration… to try and break them out of this stale pre-made course work that is 10 years out of date.

Can’t really explain the story in full but the long and the short of it was….

I taught them the standards way, the fun way, the way that they would do it in a work place… while keeping it in the here and now…

I still love teaching in my spare time :) This was all caused be me being a bit mad that I spent a year learning stuff like “director lingo” and then the industry just scoring it out.

Anyhow hang cool people :)

my site is Scottish media. feel freedrop me a line :)

Let me preface this by saying I’m not a designer. I’m a techie who loves and recognises good design when I see it and then realises just how poor my skills are. However I did my course because it touched on multimedia, film, editing and other aspects I have a deep interest in and because I wanted some formal training to back up my self-taught skills.

So… the tutors would need to be just that, TUTORS and not some failed (possibly not but it became my impression) designer wannabe. Don’t give me a quickly hacked together A4 sheet of step by step instructions on how to do something without explaining the why behind it. Especially when the s/w is as complicated as C4D.

What else – force the tutors to front up and actually give genuine feedback. I got a distinction for my C4D work but a fellow student who spent hours a day perfecting his use of it and was far better than I yet only got a merit.

Only the overall course tutor gave us feedback, yet we were told at the outset that all sections would have standard feedback forms filled out…! Yeah right.

Oh and make it relevant to us the students. Interesting to note that of the 5yrs the course has been running only 1 person has gone on to do anything in design of any sort so far. Not a good record I’d hazard and I know only a few were like me never intending to go into the ‘business’.