Design Education: Should your design education focus on a graphic design education, a web design education, or a web development education (or should you skip a formal design education alltogether)?
Choosing a Design School / Design Education Program
List of Courses in Typical Design Curriculum (Web Design, Web Development, or Graphic Design Curriculum)
Earn Design Degree Online vs. Traditional Design Degree
Top Design Schools
On allgraphicdesign we have many visitors enquiring about the many aspects of a design education. What schools are good, what they will study in a design education curriculum, is it worth the money, what area of a design education should they focus on, and what are the differences between the different areas (graphic design education / web design education / web development education / multimedia & animation education), what design school should they choose? Of course many of these questions boil down to individual opinion and circumstances, but to the extent we can we'll explore these questions about design education.
Design students and potential design students often don't understand what the difference is between a graphic designer and a web designer. In the internet age where so many people are obsessed with the web, there doesn't seem to be anything else out there. The truth is though, that most design work is still done on projects that will result in a physical product. You end up with a sign, letterhead, business card, billboard, package, or so many other things. All of these items have passed through the hands of a graphic designer.
Within the field of graphic design there are many paths that you can take. People specialize in areas such as packaging design, designing for bulk mailing, or corporate identity design. I say this because graphic design is about using images to communicate messages. That is really what web design is all about. It wasn't until people wanted to expand their means of expression that the internet boomed and became common on college campuses. It was graphic designers and artists with vision who turned the web into a powerful tool instead of just a glorified text book.
So are all web designers also graphic designers? The answer, in my opinion, is that most web designers are trying to be graphic designers. The opposite however is not necessarilly the case. When a web designer creates a website, they are trying to use a combination of text and images to convey a message. When the web designer does not have any skill in graphic design that message is often lost. A web site designed by a good graphic designer who has specialized in web design can be a work of art in its own right and it is much more likely that the graphic designer will be able to convey her message.
Problems come up when a graphic designer does not specialize in web design but they are expected to make web sites anyway. Graphic designrs without any web design experience are going to have similar problems to the web designer who doesn't know their way around graphic design. There is a lot that goes into a good website that isn't just on the surface. The graphic designer isn't going to have a background in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the graphic designer isn't going to be able to tweek their HTML (instead relying only on WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver or G-d forbid Frontpage) ... this can cause all kinds of inconsitensies on the page. Not to mention the troubles with making sure that the page works fine in multiple browsers.
While a graphic design education and a web design education often overlap, an education in web development does not overlap with one in graphic design. Web development unlike design is not about images and it is not about communication. It is about making everything work behind the scenes. The web developer is essentially a web programmer. They take a design created by a web designer and add programming to the design to give the site additional functionality. It is the web developers job to add shopping carts to a site, or login pages, or chat. The web developer makes the web interactive using languages like JAVA, PHP, PERL, ASP and many others. It is helpful if the developer knows something about web design because it makes it easier for the web developer to commuicate with the web designer, it is often not essential though.
Which direction you go in with your design education: graphic design, web design, web development, or multimedia / animation is a matter of personal taste. It is helpful in all of these areas of design to know a little bit about the others since employers often expect you to be able to do it all. It is also helpful if you plan on hiring freelancers to do the specialty work for you. Otherwise it is likely that they will be talking over your head and you won't be able to communicate your needs. Any good design education curriculum should take this into account and give you some courses that cross over into the other specialty areas.
Once you have an idea of the direction you want to go in, it makes it a little easier to choose a school. At least then you can focus on what each school offers and see how it matches your needs. It is still a tough choice though because there are a lot of schools vieing for your attention.
The next choice you need to decide on is whether you want your design education on campus or if you want to study online. You also need to decide if you want to go to a traditional college or a specialty school. I'm not going to go over the benefits and the cons of a traditional college education. It is the education most of us think about when we are considering school after high school. If you go to an art school, you lose the broad education you would get from a traditional school and instead focus on a core design curriculum. This lets you cut out a lot of courses you may not be interested in (although it is likely there will still be some) and shorten your time in school. Fewer semesters at school often means fewer dollars spent. At the least it means less time before entering the job market. If you are all ready in the job market that makes things more complicated. You can take it slow with night and weekend classes or you can work around your schedule by taking online design education classes.
It takes a different kind of discipline to get a propper design education online. The advertisements make it seem simple, and plenty of people think if its online it must be a breeze. It is easy to let work slide when its online though. It doesn't take long for the work to snowball either. If you don't keep up, if you are a procrastinator, and need someone looking over your shoulder you will be a failure trying to learn online. Online schools are a huge boon if you can handle it though. You can push all the distraction aside since you have complete control of your environment. You can do your studies when you are relaxed and you save money by not having to commute to a school or pay any kind of residence fees.
Narrowing down your exact school once you decide on the type of design school you are interested in is where it gets fun. You can imagine what you want, now you need to collect as much information about the different schools as you can. An excellent tool for this is the Allgraphicdesign school search tool. You enter in your information and it will give you a list of many schools that fit your preferences and location. You can then directly request information from those schools without searching around all of their sites. After you receive the information you can then read it at your leisure to narrow down your choices.
Search Design Schools
It is possible to enter design without a formal design education though. There are many people with careers in design that do not have a piece of paper. You can't do it without any education though. The difference is you have to find it all and do it without the support structure that a school provides. The internet is an awesome tool to find tutorials and college lectures in text and podcast. You also have to gain experience somehow before you are likely to get a job offer as a designer for a company. This can be done by freelanceing, getting a job at a printshop, or finding a job where design is a small part of a broader job description. If you get enough experience many companies will consider you for a position even if you are missing a degree. You are likely to have a harder time achieving the same salary though because you will have less to bargain with.
Below I include many graphic design, web design, and web development resources to help you with further design education research.
