- This is what I wish somebody had said to me.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake at robertoblake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
So this video is for all the
graphic design students out there.
Whether you're a first year student
or a fourth year student,
this video is probably gonna be some real-world advice
that you really need right now.
When I went to college for graphic design in 2002,
a lot of the focus was on print
and on newspaper print
and we know how that all turned out now didn't we?
Measuring columns for layouts of ads in newspaper,
a practical skill that would last me
for a decade of my career, right?
Not so much.
Yeah, sometimes I get a little cynical about the college
experience where creativity is concerned,
but I have some real-world advice for you.
You're already in school or you're thinking about it,
and the thing is, it can be helpful.
I've done videos both critiquing this fairly
on reasons you should go, reasons that you shouldn't,
and how to make up your own mind.
And the thing is, I wanna tell you something that matters
regardless of what you choose,
whether you're sticking with school or not.
Your education is in your own hands one way or the other.
Your professors have a lot of ground to cover.
There's a lot of things that they can teach you
and you should learn from their experience
but you shouldn't limit yourself to the experiences
of the people that are within arms reach of you.
You should be spending as much time as you can
learning from real-world practitioners,
studying all the available free materials online,
paying for extra courses online if you can get them,
but if you wanna learn a specific skill
or a technical piece of software that's out there,
that maybe your professor doesn't have expertise in.
My professors were fantastic at graphic design principles,
they were very creative people,
they were experienced in the print world,
but a lot of them, they knew nothing about web design
and things that I was into.
They knew nothing about animation
or motion graphics for the most part.
These were areas that I wanted to grow and evolve in
because I accurately, fortunately, predicted what the future
of the industry would look like,
and that that would be important.
And so, I actually had a lot of more advance technical
and software skills than a lot of my professors,
but I grew up in a time where there wasn't
anything like Lynda.com, there wasn't Udemy,
there wasn't Skillshare, there wasn't YouTube.
There wasn't even Google yet for the most part
for a lot of that time, or it wasn't mature enough
and it didn't have a lot of content, so guess what?
I was very much initially struggling through that
and trying to hunt and peck for resources
and a lot of it was not in the phone or video.
That wouldn't come until 2007, 2008, many years later.
And so you guys have a wonderful opportunity.
You have all this technology and all this content available
to you, much of it is for free.
You have a lot of free software out there that rivals
the paid and professional software of the days
when I got started, and so I would encourage you
to learn these tools, learn this software,
learn from real-world professionals,
be in networking groups,
take advantage of free courses online,
and just educate yourself as much as possible
beyond the college experience with that extra time.
Also, when you're in your 20s,
do not let people tell you to stop working for free
or to tell you or pressure you about the evils of spec work,
because, for you, it is nonsense.
When you're older and more mature
and your stakes are a lot higher
and you have more bills to pay or you have kids to support,
you can worry about those things.
But for now, what you really need is,
you need experience, you need a body of work,
you need hundreds of pieces of work in your experience,
you need hundreds of pieces of work
in your portfolio to sell yourself.
Not necessarily in your portfolio itself,
but you need to be able to have a hundred pieces
or more that you comb through
down to the top 10 or 20%.
The more work you do,
that quantity is going to lead to quality
because you'll have your scrap pile out of the way.
You learn by doing things.
Do not be afraid to put in your ten thousand hours of work,
even if it means doing it for free.
It's going to matter.
Everybody waiting to do work that they're gonna be paid for
is waiting for opportunities that may never come.
And in the meantime you could be doing work
and getting better, which means that,
by the time an opportunity comes, you can charge more.
That's a very real thing.
And so my most practical real-world advice is
take responsibility for your own education,
get real-world experience, do as much work as you can.
It's sometimes better to have full creative control
and do work for zero dollars
and get experience and a recommendation
than do paid work that you're ashamed to even
put in your portfolio book.
For pennies at that.
The something's better than nothing mentality
is not something that you need to apply here.
The something's better than nothing category is something
you need to apply to your body of work itself,
not to the price point column.
When you get into the real world and you have a better
and a deeper body of work than your competitors
that decided to go with the traditional model,
to only rely on their degree to get their foot in the door
and to only have their student work or the handful of work
that they got from the people they were lucky enough to talk
into paying them in their book,
and you have so much more to offer and so much more
experience than them, you're gonna crush it.
You're gonna beat them in the market place
because the thing that you can control is
you can always outwork your competition.
You may not be more talented than them,
you may not have more resources,
you may not have been to a better school,
but you can always outwork them.
And so I implore you to do exactly that.
Outwork them at every single angle
and at every single opportunity.
Do not talk yourself out of the hard work
that success requires.
That's very real.
Anyway, I hope that is advice that you guys benefit from.
I think it's the most actionable thing in the world.
Just do the work.
Let me know if you guys have questions,
put those in the comment section.
There are over 150 graphic design in our channel to help you
if you're looking for advice or tutorials,
so definitely make sure you're subscribed
and checking that out.
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.