Nicole Roberts MFA Thesis Visual Component Artwork - Savannah ...

INTrODUCtiON
Currently, a student’s competency in the professional field upon graduation is the main
and potentially only measurable indicator as to the qualitative success of one’s design
education. In this vein, the expectations of today’s industry practitioners become paramount
to the objectives of graphic design pedagogy. And with today’s heightened public perception of
design, it is becoming even more imperative to relay to students exactly what will be expected
of them upon entering into the competitive twenty-first century workplace, as measured by
today’s leading graphic design professionals. In this quest for a comprehensive set of industry
expectations, a medley of perspectives becomes applicable from the realities of current or newly
graduated design students, to the views from design educators within noteworthy schools and
leading design professionals actively working in the field. Amongst the variant professional and
educational perspectives surveyed arose three over-arching educational tenets: fundamental
skills; new modalities, methods, and media; and parallel principles of business. Their categorical
tenets ultimately served to define seven essential expectations of new graduates entering into
the twenty-first century workplace: (1) creativity, (2) craft and technique, (3) design discourse,
(4) digital media, (5) multi-disciplinary approaches, (6) innovative business strategies, and (7)
social responsibility. By defining today’s leading professional expectations, we create an informed
module of evaluation for how well current graphic design pedagogies are (or are not) preparing
students for the workplace of today. History has proven that graphic design is a profession that
will continue to grow and transform through time, thus changing the way it is taught along the
way is an inevitable requisite. These expectations combine to provide a present-day barometer
to better visualize current curricular priorities and pitfalls and to evoke an informed future of
pedagogical change.
We teach students to experiment, we teach
them to produce, we teach them methods
that will get them good jobs. Graphic design
education indeed, graphic design practice,
requires an even greater intellectual rigor.
Steven Heller
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