About the Class

“Traditionally, a graphic designer is someone who uses shape and color to communicate a piece of content on a static surface”

The problem is that design products have changed drastically over the last decade. We all spend a majority of our time looking at screens instead of paper, and digital products are not the same as printed products. Digital products need to be shown on screens of different sizes, they have dynamic content, and they allow for user interaction, motion, and animation. Most digital products also replace a linear narrative with a complex set of transitions, where any state can transition to any other state. Not to mention, they are created with programming languages. All these things make the production process much more difficult and technical. If we used to live in a world where the designer owned the entire production process, a traditional designer today is just a small part of a giant production process involving usabilitiy studies, engineering, testing, and deployment.

For a field rooted in the fine arts, this has been a difficult transition. Many design schools have noticed this development, but without the institutional knowledge to teach these new processes, they have doubled down on teaching design as a manual art. Many young design students now graduate thinking of themselves as 'creatives' – directly opposed to technical people – and they have been taught a waterfall process where they come up with ideas for others to implement: The designers are in one corner, and the programmers in another. This worldview can be highly problematic, because the way a digital product ‘feels’ isn’t just decided by color and shape. Beautiful pieces of software glue the user experience together with heavily designed experiences utilizing animation, gesture feedback, etc. All this is out of reach for a designer using traditional design tools.

“It’s important to use your hands. This is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator”

Designers should be able to prototype and build digital systems.