

How to Drop Out of Design School and Not Become a Worthless Hipster - nvk
https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/fa803a373635

======
arcosdev
What a bunch of drek. Go to engineering school, go to law school, accounting
school, hell you want to be a good designer go get a degree in psychology -
but whatever you do don't waste a second on a useless business degree. Learn
how to actually do something.

~~~
solistice
Whilst I get that there's the everlasting suit and cargo pants war, a business
degree in conjunction with personal design work, or a engineering degree with
personal business experiments makes one hell of a combo.

When you're founding a startup, your team needs to have certain skills spread
between the members. One is sufficient technical savy to put together a
product (engineering, graphic design, product design, programming, etc.), and
the other is sufficient business acumen to make people buy that product
(market analysis, marketing, accounting, salesmanship, negotiation, planning).

There is this belief often held with engineering heavy crowds which is "Build
a better mousetrap, and they will come". They won't. Your potential customers
won't suddenly feel a tingle in their stomach leading them to the store in
order to buy your mousetrap. That tingle needs careful engineering as well, as
well as getting the mousetrap into the stores, handling the payment
processing, paying the manufacturers, you get the picture.

Similarily, there's the belief in the marketing crowd that "I can sell you
anything, I just need a product". It's equally flawed, out of obvious reasons.

So obviously engineers want nothing to do with slimy business people, and
businesspeople want to have at least 3 layers of organization between them and
the filthy engineers. So if you can step into both pairs of shoes, you can
bridge that gap and you're at a distinct advantage.

~~~
rayiner
The problem is that business school doesn't teach you to close a sale or
manage an organization (vital skills, true). Its a place to learn useless
business theory and network with classmates (which is only as valuable as the
selectivity of the program).

~~~
solistice
I agree that there's little offered in those 2 areas in most business
programs. Most juicy courses are offered at the graduate level, which is why
I'd only recommend business school in undergraduate if the business side of
skills is giving you a really hard time.

There are however severak courses that I'd give a shot out of the list Sloan
makes public. Sytem Optimization Network Optimization Early Stage Capital
Finance I&II System Dynamics A whole slew of Accountig & Law Courses

As you can notice, I left out anything marketing related, current affairs
related anything industry specific and anything ethics related.

It's not that I think those are useless, because I agree with you. Business
school marketing will teach how to talk about marketing, but not how to do
marketing. Current trends are better analyzed by yourself, and industry
specific knowledge should be gained directly from the source. Go talk to some
people who are in that industry. And if you don't have personal ethics,
business ethics isn't going to help you, and if you do have them, business
ethics is not going to teach you anything beyond what you have.

Business school covers a fraction of doing business, so you have to supplement
it with other sources of knowledge (Marketing? Get your fingers dirty with
PPC. Salesmanship? Sell vacuums over your summer break). But if you have most
of your trouble with that fraction, get help with it even if it's just
formally learning the stuff.

So business school has limited utility, which should not be simply discounted.

And yes, you can study everything on your own. But then why go to college at
all?

~~~
rayiner
At the undergraduate level, I feel like you would cover those things and more
by going the industrial engineering route and supplementing with accounting
classes.

Don't get me wrong--I think those core accounting and finance classes are very
important. I personally wish I had taken some more of them while I was in law
school (we had them cross-registered with Kellogg), because it's relly
valuable, broadly applicable stuff for anyone running a business or dealing
with business clients. But a) you can self-teach that stuff as easily as you
can self-teach engineering; and b) that stuff is a necessary but not
sufficient subset of skills you need to be a great manager and leader.

That's my biggest beef with business school, especially at the undergraduate
level. I think a good engineering school serves as a reliable indicator that
someone can do the work. But with an MBA, you need to do more to see if the
person has more than the corporate finance and accounting skills they learned
in school.

------
camworld
Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You
can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from
books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just
another average designer doing average crap.

The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of
design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some
offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of
Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone
who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your
requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who
pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator
finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last
letter.

~~~
harrytuttle
_If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap
with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn 't care
to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement_

That actually made me laugh because 90% of the people we see think that is
design.

~~~
saltyknuckles
+1 I second that lol

------
spiek
This is basically link bait dressed up in medium clothes (spammy title and "in
your face" bro attitude and all).

It presupposes that the end goal is MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE. It views
school as an end to the goal, not as a worthwhile four years where you get to
experiment and make mistakes, and grow, and try weird shit that would never
fly in the business world and get way into some obscure random shit.

It seems to ignore any of the possible soul involved in artistic creation. I'm
having trouble putting down why I disliked this article so much, but I can say
that if I had enough karma to downvote it, I would have.

------
moeamaya
There are two major things missing from a self-driven design education. First,
going through a rigorously instituted design process which in turn helps
develop and mature your criticality. The addendum mentions having a mentor
which is useful even at the professional level. Where school differs is that
you get strong, unequivocal critiques from people you may not always agree
with, but these are often the most discerning and poignant criticisms. The
design studios I learned the most from were always from the critics I most
disagreed with, because they inherently challenge my preconceptions of ideas.
The second things I see as a challenge is not participating in the design
studio culture. In school you often learn from your peers, since you are all
working on the same design prompt but have vastly different perspectives. It's
such an engaging and energetic situation where you see the iteration and
problem solving where someone is working on the same problem you are but has
an entirely new approach.

These are some of my thoughts on formal design education, but I do think these
ideas could be incorporated into an auto-didactic designer curriculum.

