Cutting Class: Design Education in an Age of Austerity
Graphic designers can still sharpen skills and adapt to a rapidly changing professional landscape
I recently heard the news that Sheridan College, a renowned school in Ontario, is cutting 40 programs, citing a precipitous drop in enrolment and revenue. That’s 4-0 — not 4. It’s a remarkable, shocking slash and burn, and I’m sure that the repercussions both at Sheridan and for those in Mississaugua, Ontario, are being felt over and over with the school’s workforce being reduced by 30% or more.
Design will be included in these cuts and I can only imagine what students and faculty are feeling. Sheridan is also cutting programs in creative writing, applied science and technology, and even business.
Should we be surprised that in this day and age of ever-increasing technical efficiencies, the allure of money, and the general suspicion of arts, culture and expertise that cuts in educational programming would touch design?
No.
For the past 50 years, publicly funded schools have been cutting design and arts programming little by little and inch by inch. We used to have a music program; now we learn to play instruments. We used to have a fine arts program; now there are is charcoal drawing. We used to have darkrooms; now there is a computer lab.
Not every arts program is being cut, but, as governments in the U.S. and Canada begin restricting immigration generally and to schools specifically, it is predicted that we will see more and more cuts at colleges and universities, especially for the arts. Those students coming from other countries typically pay much more and come from advantaged backgrounds — but they also contribute to the fabric of modern student life and school programming.
Meanwhile, universities, especially in the U.S., are charging inordinate sums to provide quality education to both domestic and international students. But their pricing is actually a trade on their respective brands. Schools are effectively shorting their own stock as institutions of higher learning. When universities like Stanford or Brown (my alma matter about ten thousands years ago) charge nearly $400,000 for a four-year education, the amortization of the full value of that learning is greatly extended over the course of a student’s lifetime.
Those students and their families are now realizing this.
With enrolment down, administrators realize that revenue won’t accommodate teaching salaries, even for those of the temps they hired (adjunct faculty like I was).
These schools are to blame here — fluffing up their reputations and promises to eager students and families, charging them exorbitantly, and then switching tactics and now cutting programs.
Why *not* design?
With all of this cost cutting, schools will need to restructure their programs and the easiest programs to cut are those related to the arts. Future arts alumni are not able to be as generous as future business school alumni. And cultural “return on investment” in the arts is deemed low from government and policy standpoints, despite the fact that the arts contribute $1.1 trillion per year to the U.S. economy and $65 billion in Canada.
As well, politicians increasingly suspect that the liberal arts is a bastion of social change (because it is).
It’s clear that design education will go through a massive set of changes over the next decade. Large universities will no longer be able to afford having design and or even arts programs.
Schools that specialize in design will shrink but persevere. OCAD, RISD, SVA, SAIC and CalArts will be fine. They know how to help, handle and honour the arts and students committed to professional practice. They also will know how to find and funnel the shrinking pie of educational funding to help these students.
So, what’s a young designer to do? Should they pursue two- three- and four-year design programs?
Yes. While it will be increasingly more difficult to gain entrance to elite design schools, I encourage anyone who wants to pursue design to apply. There is nothing like in-person lectures and hands-on practicums with experienced instructors. I taught design for many years and the dialogue and decisions that took place in classrooms were often transformative.
What about the rest of us — junior designers, senior designers, art directors and even us oldster founder folks? Where should we focus our limited continuing education resources with institutional design cutbacks and less interest among governments and corporations to support the progression of human design excellence?
First, design is not going anywhere. It may get more rarified as a profession. It will definitely be commodified via Adobe, Canva and other tools. And it will continue to be standardized.
But we need more design — not less. We need designers to be as learned, supported, and captivated by design’s potential as ever.
The stakes to address climate change, authoritarianism, education and inequality through design are monumental.
Three focus areas for all designers
Moving forward, we are going to have to become more choosy, dear designer, about where to put our educational, professional development and learning resources (time and money).
I thought I might enumerate what I think are the three most important general knowledge sets that designers will need to gainfully pursue over the next five years. (Beyond that, who knows.)
Drawing
Yep, this is an oddly controversial one.
I understand that drawing is mostly eliminated from most design school curricula.
Drawing is old. It’s messy, with its weird black pencil shavings and those little white eraser bits. It’s wasteful with all of that paper. Finding teachers is difficult. Drawing takes a lot of time to learn. And some people simply can’t draw!
All of that is utter nonsense.
Drawing (whether via pen on paper or stylus on screen) provides untold benefits to the design practitioner. Drawing from life, in particular, demands observational skills that cannot come about otherwise. How do objects interact, overlap and intersect? How does negative space work within a square or a rectangle? What is light, and where is shadow?
Drawing provides a lifelong mental model that challenges and connects artist and object. It fascinates both maker and viewer, as any modern social media channels will demonstrate.
As AI continues to evolve, we’ll need more (not fewer) human designers and illustrators — artists who can capture the emotional and storytelling undertones of an idea, concept or system. Drawing undergirds all visual communications.
And truly, anyone can draw, in the same way that everyone can learn.
Typography
This one comes as no surprise to people that know me. Learning how to recognize, set and experiment with type will continue to be critical to the project of design.
The great Jeffrey Zeldman writes that design is 90% typography. (In the same post, he writes that “One illustration or original photo beats 100 stock images.”) I would humbly submit that the 80/20 better applies — design is more like 80% typography with the rest shared by colour, form and structure.
Designers need to be looking at fonts and typesetting daily. Just a few of the hundreds of elementary resources out there: Typewolf, Fonts in Use, It’s Nice That.
Also, install Fonts.Ninja in your browser. Check every other site to see what fonts are being used. Bookmark (nearly) everything.
More importantly, start setting both common and unusual typefaces in your favourite software. It doesn’t matter what that is — Figma, InDesign, Illustrator, Canva (still blech).
User Experience
I really despise this term. I mean, yes, we are digital addicts. But are we “users”? And does the work we do on our phones and computers amount to “experience”? Not really.
The closest alternative I have been able to get behind is “human interaction” but that’s pretty broad. Humans interact all of the time.
So, we go with UX. I recognize that it’s silly not to embrace naming standards when it comes to supporting a more public understanding of design.
User experience encompasses the totality of 2-D and 3-D interactive design. Like drawing and typography, user experience has evolved its own sophisticated grammar, vocabulary and structured systems. After 30 years of presenting, testing and refining interfaces, we know what generally works and does not work from an average user’s experience. We know that buttons of a certain size, type with specific characteristics, and navigation with precise controls make for better interfaces for most people.
Learning good UX will put you in good stead and there are dozens of both free and paid websites and resources out there, dear designer. A few places I continue to look to are Smashing Magazine, UX Collective and Nielson Norman Group. They have been around for-ever, but perhaps there is a reason for that.
A beat.
This trifecta — drawing, type and user experience — will continue to underpin all of design over the coming years. Even as AI evolves, template design grows, and formal design education shatters, design matters.
Yours,
P.S. Governments should superfund design.
Image of the Week
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bauhaus trained hundreds of graphic designers. Nearly all of them were men. The school, still the idealist’s working model for design programs in the west, accepted numerous young women but most were streamed into the weaving program — not into architecture, painting or typography. Söre Popitz, as Madeleine Morley writes, was the only woman graphic designer to emerge from the Bauhaus, a feat of huge proportions. The advertisement above by Popitz uses stark yet stylish illustration to show three types of women, from factory worker to housewife to socialite, presenting a new modern stovetop appliance. Popitz went on to have a long career as a designer and artist, despite the Bauhaus and its policies.
Quote of the Week
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
~ Paul Klee
I value you, dear designer. Go for a walk.
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