“The NYC startup world needs more web product design talent. NYC has perhaps the best design community in the world, but most of the designers are trained in non-web design fields (e.g. print design). Most of the good design schools don’t emphasize web product design.”—
Over the past few years, Web Design and Motion Design have emerged as full fledged sub-industries to the traditional Branding and Print Design industry. Product/Service Design is a nascent discipline, but the curricula are being created, programs are being built, and communities (this very blog) are starting to form. It’s a huge opportunity for designers to set a career path early.
quote: Chris Dixon
(via logtransition)
I’ve been a graphic designer and design educator for over 25 years and I keep an eye on the employment ads for teaching positions at colleges and universities. Web design has been a staple for a decade, but there has been a clear shift in the last two or three years and now almost every ad I see for teaching positions requires motion design. I suspect this is because there is student demand for these courses, and partially input from employers.
But I think the main reason for this turn in hiring is that current faculty generally do not have these skills or experience in this area of design (I certainly don’t — everything I do has the good manners to sit still). Departments are looking to round out their lineup. This will probably even out eventually (programs still need folks to teach studio, print, prepress, typography, advertising, and general web skills) but for the foreseeable future, if you don’t also have motion in your portfolio, you are going to get quickly passed over for teaching jobs almost anywhere.
The same is about to be true of those with experience designing for the mobile web in their portfolio. The curriculum hasn’t yet caught up, but demand for “mobile first” thinking and responsive design is spiking very, very quickly.
Source: logtransition
We need to convey to students there is nothing to be embarrassed about in terms of where you started. The focus here is on where you want to finish.
Groups Help Low-Income Students Enter College
(via gjmueller)
Students from low-income areas are in a double-bind. Even if they rise above their economic background to be accepted at college and work toward a better future, the substandard education they received at their neighborhood schools all but guarantees them the second-class academic label of “remedial” students. Neither their economic poverty nor their impoverished education are necessarily any fault of their own, but often merely the unlucky circumstance of their birth into a family in a poor, working-class neighborhood.
Colleges have reason to fear being held accountable for the very large numbers of these students they routinely accept each year, knowing that many of these students will never make it through two semesters. This practice has the advantage that the colleges can claim that they offer broad access to postsecondary education, while regarding the students who wash out as underachievers, and the high schools they came from as ineffective.
Colleges actively perpetuate the social stigma of students who are academically underprepared (“we offered them remedial classes”), while at the same time actively reduce the social stigma of students who are economically underfinanced (“we offered them financial assistance”), for the simple reason that both stragegies are in the college’s own self-interest.
Source: gjmueller
