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Choosing the Right Design School

Preparing Students for an Ever-Changing Industry

What is your design program teaching you?

In the late 1990s, more than a dozen graphic-design experts came together to lay out, once and for all, the difference between what design-education programs offered and what a student needed to learn in order to succeed in the field. As many design educators saw it, such a discussion was long overdue.

Graphic design was evolving. New technology literally had changed the vehicles for communication. Almost anyone with a good computer, access to the Internet and an interest in design now could do with desktop publishing what graphic designers formerly had done only with years of skill development and an office full of equipment. The tools of design, once controlled by professionals, suddenly were free for the taking. And with more four-year universities promoting graphic-design programs and two-year schools opening at every turn, graphic designers of the 1990s sought to make distinctions among the choices.

According to Ric Grefé, executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, it was Meredith Davis, director of North Carolina State University’s College of Design, who proposed creating standards for design education. Grefé agreed. A big believer in education, Grefé didn’t want to see all students prepared in exactly the same way in schools across the country, but he did recognize the need for standards. “The issue is not about the tools,” says Grefé, “but about acquiring the judgment to use those tools effectively. People come in [to the marketplace] with really good technical skills. It’s the judgment.”

So 12 educators—including Chris Myers at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Lorraine Wild at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and Katherine McCoy at the Institute of Design/Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago—came together to help.

The results of the study, published by AIGA and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, were controversial. Some educators at two-year programs bristled at the opinion that their schools were “insufficient to prepare an individual for entry into the field.” Others agreed with the view of Hank Richardson, president of Portfolio Center in Atlanta, that “there are a lot of fine two-year programs out there in the world.” But most concurred with the major argument of the AIGA/NASAD paper: that institutions need to do a better job of explaining their objectives to prospective students, maintaining some sort of consistency from program to program, and following through on promises to prepare students for careers in an increasingly competitive market.

Years later, many graphic-design educators say schools are failing to live up to these guidelines. Petrula Vrontikis, a design instructor since 1989 and the founder of Vrontikis Design Office in West Los Angeles, said a “general unevenness” among programs persists and that the inequity has created confusion among prospective students, who, educators say, are not savvy enough to know how to distinguish good from bad or what they want from what they think they want.

“I just think that’s a horrible disservice to students who are paying money to go there,” says Anne Burdick, a core faculty member at Art Center College of Design’s graduate media-design program in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s just not a quality education product, and that bothers me.”

In some cases, graphic-design faculty members aren’t qualified, says Davis, the chair of the task force that drafted the AIGA/NASAD papers. What makes this ineptitude even more disturbing, Davis says, is the large number of students affected by design-education problems. She reported last March at AIGA’s Schools of Thought II conference that the United States was home to more than 1,700 two- and four-year graphic-design programs, from which an estimated 43,000 students graduate every year.

“That’s a huge problem,” says Louise Sandhaus, the director of the graphic-design program at CalArts. Like other educators, Sandhaus worries about the field’s ability to employ the growing number of graphic-design graduates. Richardson, conversely, says it’s an exciting time to be a graphic designer. Sure, things are changing, he concedes, but with change comes opportunity. The new crop of designers, he wrote recently, will have chances to “design anything from the letter ‘a’ to an airplane.”

“Where advertisers are having to scurry around to figure out what or who they are in the modern world,” he says, “designers are discovering opportunities at every turn: the button on our jeans becomes an ad. The wine cork has a message. The coffee to-go cup tells a story. The telephone has become a third screen. Every surface is a potential medium, and unifying customer experiences across multichannels has never been more important. So we have to teach our students to open up their thinking—or relax into it, maybe, to allow for discovery. It’s truly a fun time to be a designer.”

Grefé agrees. He believes the actual number of annual graduates is much smaller than 43,000, and he says he’s not concerned about good graphic designers flooding the market. What he is concerned about, he says, are “para-designers”—people who have technical skills but lack the judgment to work with content or to meet the expectations of the marketplace.

That’s where education comes in. With the right training, Grefé says, there wouldn’t be any para-designers. Of course, there are plenty of opinions—some of them divergent—about how to make good education happen. Davis wants to see students who understand not only form making but also the technology that makes it possible. In days gone by, she says, young designers would have come up as typesetters and paste-up artists, building a strong technical foundation for themselves along the way. These days, she laments, technical knowledge has been abdicated to “geeks who ride around in VWs to help you with your network problems.” It would be nice, she says, to have designers who know “what it takes to get a really, really good Web site to work.”

Boundaries are blurring. Definitions are out the window. At Art Center, Burdick says, even the name of the graphic design program has changed repeatedly—from “graphic design and packaging,” to “graphic design and new media,” to “communication design and new media,” and now, simply, to “media design.” It’s an effort to capture a field in flux. But Sandhaus says she doesn’t want the industry to change so much that it loses what she sees as its foundation: the creation of “intelligent visual form.”

Other educators talk about the importance of “holistic” programs, through which, Richardson explains, schools offer not only a course of instruction but also an expression of a philosophy. In the years ahead, design may play a greater role in the marketplace. Grefé believes the impact of design on the next decade will be “absolutely startling.” But for designers to seize the opportunities and take what Vrontikis calls “a higher seat at the table,” they will need to be both conceptual and perceptual thinkers, educators say.

Programs must continue to try to meet the standards laid out years ago by AIGA/NASAD, educators agree. “Education has to be about fulfilling promises,” explains Richardson. But educators point out that prospective students also have a role to play.

“Prospective students are asking the wrong questions,” Vrontikis says. “They’re asking: ‘What’s the best school?’ And that question is not going to yield the best answer.” The questions students need to be asking are: What’s the best school for me, given my own aspirations? Am I interested in professional practice or in something less commercial?

These are tough questions, educators admit, especially since it’s hard to know the difference between, say, CalArts and Art Center before entering a program. “Prior to that,” Burdick says, “it’s mostly marketing that you’re responding to.” But the answers are there, and so are the programs. It’s just a matter of choosing.

“I think there’s an education revolution going on,” Richardson says. “Everybody’s taking a look at who they are and what they are because the industry is changing out there.”

Step Five: Choose a School

Nine Steps to a Career in the Visual Arts

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