Tag Archives: internet

design, education, World Wide Web

Design Students: Just One Word

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404 Page not found graphicIn the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) takes young Ben (Dustin Hoffman) aside at his graduation party:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: ‘Plastics.’
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.

This short scene served to underscore the divide between the young and old generations of that age. The term ‘generation gap’ had just recently been coined. Today, advice is still given, and because of “The Graduate,” it bears much of the generational divide and paternalism that separates adviser and advisee. So it is with considerable unease that I offer my advice to students of design who are concerned about their future, post-graduation. Just one word: Web.

Old Guys Do Print

We know that the jobs for fresh graduates are in the digital realms, not in print. A couple of years ago NSCAD design grad and Halifax designer Jeff White posted an entry on his website called “How to Get a Job as a Designer:”

  • Don’t email all of the companies at one time.
  • Find out the names of the hiring person at each company you want to work at and address us individually. With the web, it’s really not hard, and shows some initiative on your part.
  • Don’t email us a big PDF of your work. Many of us receive a big chunk of our email on a handheld device, and downloading a 3MB PDF is a hassle, even over 3G.
  • There is next to no work for print designers in Halifax at this time. You’ll need (a lot of) web experience to really get in the door. I’d suggest spending the next few months honing your web design skills. Put together a killer portfolio online, find some non-profits looking for a designer, and go after them. We’re all looking for designers with fresh ideas who also understand how to code XHTML/CSS/Actionscript and everything else. Being a multi-talented designer will keep you employed.

Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, the majority of students seem to be avoiding digital media. Real media is all the rage: the Craft Division can’t keep up with the demand for “book arts” courses. In design, print and product design are the stars of the show.

Design graduates who are qualified to do web design are reporting back to us that they have been successful landing web design work, and striking-out in their attempts to break into print and other design areas. The reason for this is simple: ‘old guys’ do the print stuff. They have years of experience and they’re unfamiliar with web design. So for students in design school, the key to their future success is one word: Web.

404 Course Not Found

Around the same time as his “How to Get a Job” posting, Jeff discussed “The State of Design Education in Nova Scotia.” I consider Jeff a very knowledgeable commentator—he’s taught two of our web design courses. In his post, he criticized design educators in general and NSCAD in particular for not paying enough attention to web design:

One thing a former student mentioned was the need for a more intensive studio-level course in web design. I couldn’t agree more. A dedicated course in web typography…is also absolutely essential…

…So what can we do? As industry members we have a responsibility to push our educational institutions to provide up-to-date and appropriate courses for students. We’re the ones who will reap the benefit. Just the other day I sat in the office of the president of a major local web developer who was crying for at least two web designers with front end coding (XHTML/CSS/Javascript) capabilities. I was able to think of only one person and he’s not even from our city. Industry groups like the GDC and ACIMA also need to get more involved in the students side of things, and the student side of ACIMA is something I’m going to be working towards next year. The GDC doesn’t seem to have much interest in the web at all, but if enough of us got involved, maybe we could change that.

NSCAD’s Bachelor of Design program has a web design course that is a requirement for graduation. It teaches students XHTML/CSS and how to create web standards-compliant websites. But Jeff has a point. Where are the other web design courses that provide more in-depth opportunities and experiences?

Intermediate Interactive Design

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404 page from myfamouswebsite.com

It’s no wonder that some people complain that NSCAD doesn’t educate its designers in web design: it seems as though only one, the Intro course, is ever taught. Intermediate Interactive Design is the follow-on course to the required introduction course, and we offer it every year. I teach the course when I can, and I love it. The course is an examination of the historical and theoretical foundations of interactive design and communication, with practical studio projects, such as learning how to install and develop websites using a popular open-source content management system, Joomla. We read and discuss some of the seminal articles in hypertext, user interface and information architecture theory and practice. Students have opportunities to learn new software and techniques, and to apply this knowledge to solving practical problems.

The course last ran in 2009 and may not run in 2011. But don’t blame NSCAD: the course was offered in 2010, and when only five students enrolled, it had to be cancelled.

The course is being offered again in Winter 2011 but only four students have enrolled. It risks cancellation for the second year in a row.

There is only so much that we, those of us from the older generation, can do to encourage young people to benefit from our mistakes and take advantage of our insights. When we do this too forcefully, we risk sounding paternalistic, or, even worse, irrelevant. Students know that they will leave university heavily in debt, and because they are paying for their education with much of their own hard-earned cash, they expect value for their money. And at the moment, students don’t seem to value web design.

Intellectual Property

Anti-Downloading Law Firm Caught Infringing IP

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There is a copyright violation here.

It was recently reported by Boing Boing and The Hollywood Reporter that a legal firm called “US Copyright Group” is seeking to sue thousands of Bittorrent users for copyright infringement. The website for this group of lawyers uses stock photography and html frames (who uses frames nowadays?) — it’s a real classy design job. I was curious about these images. Having used some stock photography in the past, I know that, depending on the license, you have to give credit to the photographer, the collection and/or the image company.

Using TinEye it was determined that the stock image used on their “Solutions” page is Getty Images’ royalty-free photo #86512636. But just because it’s ‘royalty-free’ doesn’t mean that the photo can be used without credit. IP lawyers, above all, should know that the license agreement sometimes contains ‘gotchas’. Getty Images’ Royalty-Free Image and Footage License Agreement, Section 4.3, states that:

All Licensed Material used in an editorial context, must include the following credit line adjacent to the Licensed Material: “[Photographer’s Name]/[Collection Name]/Getty Images” or as otherwise shown on the Getty Images website. If Licensee omits the credit, an additional fee in an amount up to one hundred percent (100%) of the License Fee may be payable by Licensee, at Getty Images’ sole discretion. The foregoing fee shall be in addition to any other rights or remedies that Getty Images may have at law or in equity.

And as you can see in this screen shot, there is no photo credit for Getty Images. I wonder what “rights and remedies” the copyright holder will exact from these scofflaws?

Arduino, design, electronics

What I did on my Summer Vacation

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One of my projects, circa 1983

In 1980, just after I graduated from York University with an MFA, I took up electronics. I was working part-time at a private radio station about an hour’s drive from Toronto; this radio station was one of the first in the world to go fully automated in the early 1970’s. Today automation in broadcasting is a given, but at that time it was a big deal. My job was to “program” the machine they called “OTTO” so that it could run overnight without any human intervention. Programming involved selecting square aluminum wafers of different colours that were about 8cm square, with 5mm holes bored through them. One colour square represented a music selection, a different colour represented a commercial, and another represented a weather report. I had to stack these about a hundred high in a holder according to the station log, which determined what advertisement should go when. Heaven help you if you did not close the stack holder properly–the squares might land in a pile all over the floor.

I got curious about electronics because at the time the station converted OTTO from a mechanical system to an electronic system–which meant that instead of stacking squares of metal, you stood in front of OTTO and punched in the program using a keypad.

I was interested in electronics because I wanted to create interactive box/sculptures that changed with human presence. I dove into the subject and although I was in some ways greatly hampered by a lack of mathematical skills, I became quite a competent designer of digital gizmos. I even built several microcomputers, one using the RCA 1802. My first entree to programming was flipping switches on this single board computer to make an LED flash on and off.

When the Macintosh came along, my interests moved elsewhere, and for the past fifteen years, until this year, I have been largely focused on interactive media using the web. My electronics workshop remained in boxes from 1985 to this past July, when I set things up again, and bought some new gear and new parts.

One of the parts I purchased was a microprocessor called the Arduino. It’s an open source prototyping computing platform used by many artists and designers around the world.

I’m still interested in human interaction with computers; I want to try to meld old interfaces and traditional materials with computers. One thing that will help me in my quest is a new service called “Pachube” (pronounced ‘patch-bay’): Pachube is “a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.”

In my current experiment, I have connected some sensors to an Arduino, and the Arduino sends the sensor data to my home computer, which uploads the data to Pachube, which makes it available to others online. In this case, a widget called PachuDial takes the data and makes a Flash-enabled dial, which updates every few minutes on this blog. I could Twitter this information, and I can plot it to my home virtually on a Google SketchUp model, and publish my virtual home online (if I wanted). To see the most advanced work from Pachube, view this YouTube video.