AIGA: Voice

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From Voice ~ Topics: college, graduate, mentoring, professional development

A Design Education Manifesto

by Mitch Goldstein | March 08, 2011

School is hard. Design school is especially hard because so much of it exists within the abstract, the opinion. There are few, if any, absolutes as you go through design school. Much of design education is about learning some key techniques and then trying to apply them to your work in interesting ways. The following are some thoughts I have about how to go through a design program and get the most out of the experience, and beyond as a creative professional.

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  1. Always take risks.
  2. Be aggressive.
  3. Break the rules.
  4. Look at everything. Dismiss nothing.
  5. Be obsessive.
  6. Be uncomfortable.
  7. Be opinionated.
  8. Be a cop.

This article was originally published on Mitch Goldstein’s MFA blog and has been modified slightly for this forum. Thumbnail image by Mitch Goldstein.

About the Author: Mitch Goldstein is a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Visual Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a principal of Hypothesis, an interdisciplinary visual design studio based in Richmond, Virginia. He has been an adjunct faculty member teaching graphic design at Rhode Island College and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he also earned his BFA. You may know him from when he was Angry Paul Rand on Twitter.