For the past three weeks I’ve interviewed for an assistant in web and print design — with little to no success. The position is perfect for a college student or the technically inclined changing careers; however, the portfolios and teaching methods from these schools is more than questionable — it’s downright disastrous.
The majority of my interviewees have come from Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and I’m sure this is more so regarding proximity than anything else. However, a brief look through Alumni Portfolios reveals the same dated methods:
- Splash page
- Full flash embedded websites (most also with a splash page)
- This site requires…
- Frames?!
- Imageready and Photoshop are not web development tools, regardless of what Adobe says
After time, like most users, right when I saw flash starting to load, I closed the screen.
- Except these designers came close:
- Wilson Gheur (no points gained for lack of semantics, audio loading and invalid pages)
- Justin A. Metros (on the proper path, but a lot of divitis and break tags without semantics)
- Juan Carlos Añorg (best of all, strong knowledge of html, in the right direction and only slightly shy of proper semantics and validation)
And that’s it, from atleast what their career center could send me. Examples of Professor websites and websites from current students were not much better.
Now I’m sure there’s a few diamonds in there that they just aren’t finding me, but it’s blatantly apparent that this school isn’t teaching modern web development in the true sense. What level of professionals are they preparing for the real world? The same dated designers running without a care for proper methods and costing their clients money? Caring nothing for Accessibility, market reach, and SEO?
Design is knowing your tools. These students pay good money for those lessons, they should be taught — my blame falls squarely on the establishment for their lack of experience and sincerity. Their own website validation with over 30 errors should be a message loud and clear that Academy of Arts University should be preparing students to be designers in the present sense.
What to do?
The question is how to further educate these schools that their mistakes are blatant (and if that’s in debate, I’ll take the pepsi challenge against you any day). This shouldn’t be a standards vs. everyone else camp — there’s no everyone else anymore that’s current and up to speed.
My advice to new students in this medium: test your professors and your school sites before hand. As a print designer turned web, I self taught with the help of HTML Dog tutorials, and asking questions left and right on Codingforums (users such as Brothercake and dotfive’s own Andrew Krespanis kept me inline and on the right path), read Simplebits Publications and Zeldman’s Designing with Standards. My web coding and development training was significantly cheaper and yet more advanced than anything I saw come out of a University so far… and that’s not right.
Anyone show me a school teaching it right that I can recommend?