Stephen Hay has written an excellent manifesto for meaningful design. Actually it’s more like a manual. He begins by saying there’s a lot of design sameness on the web and then proceeds to show how to avoid this: start by developing a great concept, rather than just firing up Photoshop and styling away. His 5-step ‘design funnel’ method sounds good and I’m certainly planning to try it out for one of my next projects.
But there’s one thing that got me wondering. On his personal website, Stephen says:
Many (web) design curricula are now tool-based, and I notice many designers skipping or drastically shortening the thinking process behind a design, preferring to dive into Photoshop or (insert tool here).
Now I don’t know about other schools, but at mine this certainly was not the case. Our lessons were very much about developing concepts, rather than style; our teachers were always asking us why we made certain decisions. When we complained about the lack of practical Photoshop classes they used to tell us we’d learn all of this during our internships, as 4 years of art school were much too short to waste time learning computer skills.
I finished art school 6 years ago, but I don’t think this has changed much. Then again, there’s probably a big difference in attitude between art schools and those fancy multimedia courses that are popping up everywhere…
