Valhalla Island

Everything relates directly to a job and everything is a job. Design work at university has nothing to do with creating and learning to create good work but has everything to do with impressing the customer. That may seem like the same thing but even though they often overlap, it’s not.

Design school has made me realise I like academia. I like to learn things for the sake of learning, because I want to learn. I do not like to learn things for the purpose of making money on graphic design jobs that clients may request from me. For me, that feels like artificial learning and while it might be a fact of life, all my other courses do a wonderful job at pretending the commericial application of what I’m learning doesn’t exist.

Our projects are all treated as contract work with our tutor being the client. Our lectures teach us about wayfinding, pre-press and typography, which is good but they slip in a few too many “because clients often ask for that”. Tutorials are meetings with our tutor/client.

I can understand how this would prepare us for the ‘real world’ but I don’t want to be doing client work for the rest of my life or even for a significant percentage of my life. If I wanted to work, I would be working, I wouldn’t be at university.