- Hey everybody.
This is graphic designer Roberto Blake and in today's video
I'm going to talk about the things they don't teach you,
in fact five specific things they don't teach you
in graphic design school.
So while I know I've been out of school for a long time now,
since I'm 30, I still have my finger on the pulse
of what is going on in design schools.
I actually talk with a lot of design students,
both through the channel and otherwise,
both in life and in social media.
My brother is in school to be a graphic designer right now.
So it's not as if I don't know what's going on
and what you guys are and are not being taught
in most cases.
There will obviously be exceptions to the rule here.
But here are the five things that I'm finding
that you guys are not learning in graphic design school.
I'm going to be addressing those things here on the channel,
and a little bit in this video.
But in most cases I've already talked about a lot
of these topics at length.
And I think that they'll still be helpful for you,
so make sure you're subscribed and that you're checking out
all the different graphic design playlists
here on the channel to get that information.
So here are the five things you guys are probably
not learning in design school
that you absolutely need to be learning.
How to actually get a job as a graphic designer.
Now I know you probably think that, okay,
well you've got your degree, you've got a portfolio,
they had you do a resume.
That's it, right?
You should be able to go out,
go get interviews, apply to job boards.
If you've been looking at social media
and participating in graphic design forums
which you absolutely should,
which they're probably not telling you to do that,
but that's a whole other topic,
then you would know that people are doing that,
and not finding jobs and not being able to get jobs
as graphic designers with just their college degree.
When I was hiring at the ad agency I worked at,
I had to turn away people from some
of the top design schools in the country.
We're talking Pratt, Parsons, FIT, School of Visual Arts.
They would not be able to handle the job,
walking into an ad agency,
and deliver for the clients.
They absolutely were just not going to be able
to do that, and that's not a jab at them,
that's not a knock on them.
They were still very talented, great professional
young men and women.
They just did not have the skills
to qualify or command a certain salary,
or to be expected to do the work.
Hiring them would be setting them up for failure,
because there's things they just didn't learn,
and understand both on the technical side,
on the career side.
They didn't understand how to pitch,
they didn't understand how to promote themselves,
they didn't understand how to research beforehand,
and prepare a portfolio that would match
the job requirements.
They just didn't know how to do any of those things.
So, what you're not learning sometimes is
what employers in the job market,
what senior designers who are going to be interviewing you,
what art directors, what creative directors.
You're learning what your professor might want from you
in terms of how to grade you,
and what their personal tastes are,
and what they think should be in a portfolio,
and how many pieces they need to see
before they can make a decision about you.
You're not learning about
what an employer putting real money on the table
is going through, and the anxiety that they're feeling.
So imagine that I'm going to hire you
to be a graphic designer.
And imagine that we do amazing client work.
Imagine that we do billboards
and we get 20 and 50 thousand dollars
to deliver a great billboard for a company
that's going to bring them, you know,
a million dollars in business that year.
That's a lot of pressure.
What I need from you is to show me
as much work and create as much value
and be as confident as possible
when you're presenting to me, in order for me
to say that I can put a job like that
on your shoulders and in your hands.
If you're not confident, if you're not
articulating yourself very well,
if your communication skills are lacking.
That's going to translate very poorly.
If I find that, you know,
you don't have skills in print production,
how much time can I lose to train you?
A lot of you are going into this thinking that,
well I'll get job training and they'll, you know,
help me out, and that's part of it,
and within a month, two months, I'll be up to speed.
Every day that you're having to be trained
the company is losing money.
And on some level they expect that.
But you need to mitigate that loss.
That's something that I'm sure a professor has not
told you yet, and that's not a knock on them.
They have so much to teach you and educate you on
in a short period of time, that teaching you,
and they may not have awareness of this.
What someone in the hiring chair, what someone
in the entrepreneur chair,
what someone in the business world
wants and needs and expects from a designer
is a whole different level of pressure
and category and a whole level of anxiety
that you have to overcome.
You literally have to make people feel comfortable,
you practically have to seduce them into giving you a job.
And I don't mean that literally.
Do not get anybody into legal troubles with that,
or anything like that.
I mean that you have to literally make them trust you,
like you, feel confident in you,
and find that you are desirable in terms
of filling the position and delivering.
And if you can't do that you can't land a job.
And many of you are not prepared to do that.
So my advice is learn the skills of salesmanship.
Some of you have had retail jobs before,
and you'll be able to use that psychology,
and the psychology of selling
to help you get through an interview,
and be very successful.
You will use that to help you land clients.
That's going to be very helpful for you.
If you've never had a retail job
that was a commission sales job,
you don't know how to do that yet.
You don't know how to be a champion for a customer,
solve a problem, find a solution,
and make them grateful to hand you their money.
You haven't learned that skill yet,
and that lacking is what's going to damage your career.
And if you're professors aren't instilling in you that
at some level, you need to be auditing marketing
and business classes in addition
to your graphic design classes.
This goes into our second point.
How to get clients.
Not all of you are going to want to work for an ad agency.
Not all of you are going to want to work for a magazine.
Not all of you are going to want
to work for an in-house agency.
Some of you are going to want to be marketing mercenaries
and go out there running and gunning as a freelancer.
And your professors aren't necessarily
preparing you for that, because may not believe in it,
they may not see the value in it.
But understand this, that you don't even have to be
the most successful freelancer in the world
to scale to six figures.
If you think about it, doing that would mean taking on
ten clients a month at $1000 a project.
That might sound extraordinary to you
because you're a student, but that's because
you don't yet understand the value
of some of the work that you're going to be producing.
And you're not thinking that you'll have clients
with those budgets.
If you have a web design client, and you're having
to be a web designer, those projects scale
from anywhere, from, yeah they could be low-balled,
they could be somebody's small mom and pop
that wants to an $800, $500 website.
Or, they could be a small startup business
that has $1200 to $2500 to invest in it.
So right there, if you were able to get four of those,
that's your ten grand for a month.
If you have a system for replicating that,
you scale to six figures before the end of the year.
You don't know to align yourself with a marketing company
that can feed your pipeline as a designer
and will bring clients to you to handle the visual end,
and they just mark up your services.
You don't know to build that relationship yet,
because no one's telling you that.
I'm telling you that though.
And that's why you need to be subscribed to this channel.
Not for my sake but because I'm trying to help you build
in your graphic design career, and understand
what it takes to really be successful.
And I'm trying to solve your problems.
That's why I'm delivering for you.
That's the value that I'm creating.
Demonstrate and create value for your clients.
This is what is the secret that is lost
on so many designers.
They think that all they have to do
is create quality work, and that's true.
Quality work trumps everything.
But what is quality work?
It's quality work when it delivers
on the needs of the client.
Not when it's quality work
because you just feel good about it,
or because you're able to do your style
and do what you wanted to do,
but it solved the problem of the client,
or their audience, or their customer, or their clients.
Which brings me to my next point.
Understanding how to market yourself.
Understanding how to market yourself means
understanding how to communicate, how to story tell,
and as a graphic designer intuitively know
how to do that for other people.
But when it comes to yourself
I find that many graphic designers,
they can do amazing work for their clients,
but they are less than amazing when it comes to
marketing and promoting and branding themselves.
And this is so very important.
This is absolutely important,
and it is the biggest mistake
that most graphic designers make in their careers.
And this doesn't just apply to freelancers.
You need to be doing this as an in-house designer
or agency designer well,
because you need to be constantly upping your game
and upping your value so that if you need to move on
to another job you can command a higher salary.
Not a lower one, not the same one
just because the economy shifts.
Or so that one day you can scale
and go to a higher position
so that you're not just a designer.
Maybe one day you become a head of an art department.
Maybe one day you become a studio manager.
You need to be positioning yourself for that
and have a plan.
And that plan includes marketing yourself,
learning how to toot your own horn
without sounding arrogant or presumptuous,
or pretentious, and knowing who you need to be speaking to,
and who you need to be speaking with, how to network.
All these things that you're probably not learning.
You might be learning the basics of Photoshop.
You're learning gestalt uniform principles,
you're learning about the Bauhaus,
you're learning about LetterPress,
and you're learning about all these other things
which some of them are great, and some of them are archaic.
But you're not learning how to sell.
You're not learning how to sell yourself,
and at the end of the day all that tremendous knowledge
is for naught when you're staring at student loan debts
and you can't either get clients or get an employer
to get you out of the hole.
And its going to come down to salesmanship.
You're going to have to put in the work there as well,
and if you're not learning how to do it you need to be.
Let's talk to a more lighter point here.
How to find inspiration.
One of the things that designers often struggle with
is how to get over creative blocks
and how to discover inspiration.
And how to do that without necessarily copying anyone.
Now first of all you have to get past your own idea
that anything quote unquote original,
truly original, exists.
You may have never seen it,
someone might have done it a thousand years ago.
Whatever idea you have, someone's had it.
There's 6.7 billion people in the world right now,
and yeah, some of them are toddlers,
but I'm sure at some point,
someone had the same idea as you.
I can't tell you how many times
I've drawn or sketched something or wrote something down
or had a conversation with somebody,
and then two years later I'm watching the movie.
It happens.
So, again, in terms of inspiration,
stop thinking about it.
Walk away from it.
You know, and I do whole videos on inspiration.
Where you can find it.
Magazines, movies, books, music.
The thing is, you don't think outside the box
when you put yourself in a cubicle.
So get out there, experience the world.
The world's gonna be your greatest inspiration.
And getting out of your own head
and getting out of your own usual environment
is gonna be the best thing you can do.
And again, I don't know that that's advice
that you've gotten so far.
Finally, last point.
How to be successful as a graphic designer.
I know that the whole point of college for you
probably was to learn how to be successful
as a graphic designer.
But ultimately it wasn't.
It was to give you the basic prerequisite skills
to eventually become successful.
You don't become successful as a graphic designer
without understanding who is already successful
as a graphic designer.
You need to be looking
at Graham Smith, David Airey, Jacob Cass.
You know, you need to look at designers
that you admire and respect their work.
And if you don't know the names of some of these people,
Milton Glaser, Saul Bass.
But again some of those are older.
You have much more modern examples,
like Radim Malinic, Karen Maris, Karen Kavett, myself.
There are a ton of graphic designers that are
more relevant to you today that you can scale
to be as successful as.
And that you can learn from them, and their example.
And their stories are more open I would say,
because of the fact that those other people I talked about,
that was the era pre-youtube and pre-internet,
and all those things aside from David Airey,
and there may not be as much content out there
for you to experience what their personality,
their quirks, and learn about them and their work
and their style.
So, you'll be looking at Wikipedia entries
and its not quite the same thing.
So regardless of who you want to learn about,
learn about successful graphic designers,
learn what the gap is between you and them,
and figure out a strategy and a plan for closing that gap.
Anyway, I hope this video was informative.
I hope you guys were educated and entertained by it.
And that you now have an idea of some things
that you're not learning in graphic design school.
If you still have questions or comments or you have
some ideas of other things that you're not learning
in graphic design school, I'm interested.
Let me know in the comments section below,
and I will talk about it with you.
I'll respond to as many comments as I possibly can.
If I don't get to yours I apologize.
I try to get to every single one of the comments
at some point.
Anyway, like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome content on the channel.
As always you guys, thanks so much for watching.
And don't forget, create something awesome today.