The Topic: Preparing Students for Industry Success
Moderator: Chuck Carey, President and Co-Founder, Troika Design Group
Panelists: Michael Benson, EVP, Marketing, ABC Entertainment Group
and PromaxBDA Chairman
Bear Fisher, SVP, Creative Director, Comcast Entertainment Group
Steph Sebbag, President and Creative Director, bpg
Niels Schuurmans, EVP Brand Marketing & Creative, Spike

So here is the “take away”–

For students preparing for an interview and planning a career in media, six things to know. (These really are universal as far as preparing for any interview.)

1. Where do you fit in? You must know this before going to any interview. Know what your skills and strengths are, and basically what you want to do.
2. Be prepared to show examples of the type of work you want to do.
3. You must do your homework before going to an interview. The panelist said 90% of the applicants they interview have not looked at their web site (!!!)
4. Understand all aspects of the field. Understand how the business works.
5. All the panelists said that they put personality and passion above education. The panelists talked about passion a lot…
6. But work experience is important too, so internships are critical.

Working in the interactive field generally requires an understanding of design process, visual and interaction design, technical production, and business skills.

In order to obtain experience in both design and technical production, I recommend students take courses that cover the subjects I’ve outlined below.  A student needs to spend time exploring different classes to find out what they are good at and what they enjoy doing. When working in interactive design, you may or may not be responsible for technical production. On many projects a separate technical team will be involved. But it’s good to understand the technical side of the interactive field. Even if you don’t become an expert in technical production, if you understand what’s involved, it will make you more employable— and a better team member on any project.

Visual and Interaction Design: Everything and anything about visual and interaction communication design is useful.

A student will need an understanding of the following mediums:
Web, Mobile, Exhibition (kiosks, touch screens etc.), Product, and Print

Although understanding Interactive Design is more than learning an assortment of applications,  a student should have a basic understanding of the following applications:

Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash, WordPress (or some other type of Content Management System), for motion: AfterEffects, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, and for video: Final Cut Pro.

A student should find classes that focus on technical production and design, rather than classes which only cover a specific application such as Dreamweaver. I also believe a student’s learning needs to be self-directed. As a student, and also as a working professional, you will need to keep up with new information that develops within the Interactive field—a field which tends to experience more rapid changes than others (such as print, for example).

I’m not aware of an educational track covering all of these skills outside of applying to a BFA or MFA program. Even with an advanced degree, your studies will be deficient in the area of business and industry experience. (*See the link below for more information about what a curriculum should include).

*For more ideas on what you need to know for Interactive Design, see Leslie Jensen-Inman’s website Teach the Web. She has conducted interviews with over 30 web and interactive professionals and asked the following question:

If you could create your dream curriculum for web design and development, what courses and information would you include? Why? What courses and information now in such programs would you eliminate? Why?

Here are the answers.

The answer may surprise you,

The biggest challenge is managing students’ expectations.

While in London last week, I had the opportunity to talk to a teacher about his experiences instructing high school students. He teaches high school students how to think about digital media, to conceive digital projects and to complete their ideas using whatever tool is the best for the project — be it HTML, Flash, Processing etc. Admirably, these same students go on to teach middle school students similar types of digital media skills.

I asked him what his biggest challenge is teaching digital media. “Many times students come up with ideas that have the complexity of a graduate school thesis.”

My challenge teaching runs along the same line. I find that students are so familiar with complex digital media solutions, our digital media has gotten so sophisticated — be it highly interactive websites, smart phone applications, seamless delivery of broadband content — that there is an underlying assumption the things we use everyday are somehow easy to create.

For my graphic design students there is this common frustration:

What a student can imagine and design, they may not be able to technically create.

—-

Update 08/14/09: In all fairness, students are not the only ones who assume digital solutions are easy to create and implement. The public in general does not possess a basic understanding of what’s involved in conceptualizing, designing and building interactive projects. In large part, the digital media community is responsible for educating the public in order to develop this understanding.

I see it way too often that if creative and technical work together at all, they work in a sequential manner. First comes design, then comes technical. The two work completely independent from one another — sort of a “here is the design, can-you-do-it kind of approach.”

Maybe this kind of thinking dates back to the “old” days of print when the designer designed and the printer printed and there wasn’t much collaboration between the two. Nowadays, this does NOT work and nothing could be more detrimental to the quality of a project – nothing leads to more mediocre work than dividing the process into two separate stages.

In order to be successful, the process needs to include input from all sides. And notice that I haven’t really mentioned what this “thing” is that we’re designing, but I’m speaking of any design that is digital and requires technical considerations.

Design and technical unite — collaborate from the beginning to create better work!

This is a fantastic video explaining how designing for web is different than print — all students new to website design need to watch this video!

Jason Santa Maria
Jason has been recognized for designing stylistic and imaginative web interfaces that maintain a balance of usability and readability. Jason is a celebrated speaker worldwide at such conferences as South By Southwest, An Event Apart, @media, and Webstock. He also maintains a popular website where he frequently holds discussions on design for the web.

About the Lecture Series
The Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short talks in an informal setting. Wisdom will be revealed and methods will be shared in a environment intended to satisfy both social and scholarly pursuits.

http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/

My first thought is, you don’t want a website.

Let’s just put that out on the table and rather than jumping to the solution — because a website is (or should be) an interactive solution to a problem — let’s talk more about what you do before we talk about what you need.

Sure, I need to know what the client wants for the company and for the product or service. Selling widgets may require a different solution than finding a market for a service. But most importantly, I need to know everything I can about a company’s customer base and what they want. And it might not be a website — although it will probably include something interactive. (okay, yes it will probably be at least a website.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the article “Multiscreen Mad Men” from the New York Times’ Screen Issue from November 2008. Here’s a great quote from Lars Bastholm of Ogilvy North America:

“Now our job is to have a conversation with your consumers about whatever story it is you want to tell about the brand.”

That pretty much nails it on the head. Effective communication design is about having effective, relevant, useful conversations with consumers. And that is why a client doesn’t want a website, a client wants an effective conversation with consumers and whatever can deliver that communication best is what the client needs.