teaching design

Even though I just had my highest art sales ever, I do graphic design and teach design at an art college. Part of my job is to teach the process of design from start to finish. The students all have real clients with small businesses who need branding and we also make the posters for student films. Mine are the first design classes our students take.

Things are so different than when I studied design. We hand lettered our posters, we used ink, stat cameras and paste-up. Images had to be hand-drawn or painted. One had to go to the library or bookstore or buy a magazine to get reference pictures.

Now students google everything...google images. I suggest they go to the type foundaries and good stock image sites but often find students still on google and on the free font sites such as dafonts or myfonts. If you need a font for any project you just download it for free. It's hard to teach them the value of a well-drawn typeface and kerning pairs that took years to work out.

The other day a student found a lovely tif of an antique painting which seemed perfect for his movie poster. I assumed it was a reference for style and asked him what media he was going to use and what he was going to do with it.

"Why can't I just use this?" he said.

"You can't just take a photo off Google and sell it to your client," I responded.

"I can't?"

I continued, "Your client could get sued. They could sue you. If it was that easy, your clients would do their own posters."

All our students draw well. They go through 'Drawing Bootcamp' and even if they can't draw before Bootcamp, they can when they come out. But it is the hardest thing to get students to do something off the computer and scan it in. It's an odd thing. They will take all kinds of stuff directly off the web and put it in their file as an image. Or worse: 'live trace' it.

Live tracing: It has a certain look that I am already tired of seeing, a look which will define our era. A lazy look.