Practice Makes Perfect

Graphic Design has been a hobby and passion of mine for quite some time now and being able to study it and pursue it as my career both excites and scares me at the same time.In the last 2 years at Grant Macewan, I have observed that repetition and practice of the programs is not stressed enough.

What makes studying graphic design so different for me, is that instead of just reading and understanding the topics, there is also the visual understanding of how things go together. The visual understanding really is key to being a good designer, without any consideration for space, elements, placement, and colors, there would only be a scattered mess of objects that would be of no interest to any client. I know for many graphic design students including myself, there is so much technical, and visual information being thrown at us in such a short time span; it can be overwhelming sometimes to be faced with loads of new information, and sometimes we feel we might burst from stress.

I feel that practise and repetition of the programs should be enforced more than it is right now, because of all the different information being thrown at us from one program to the next. The technical advancement for graphic designers has skyrocketed in the last 10 to 20 years and we have so much to choose from when designing with a computer. In this day and age its pretty hard to go without a mac if your looking for work. So with new technology comes alot more knowledge that we have to absorb if we want to be able to use any of it for the things we design.

Because design is more hands on then just reading material and understanding it, design students need to be practising these programs every single day to really master them for our career’s. Many teachers forget that it is our first time with these huge and info loaded programs, that they speed right through the practice process and expect us to remember the steps the first time we learn them. Not only that, but we also feel stupid for not always remembering how to do something. www.edufire is a helpful website because it offers online one on one help sessions for graphic designers, so if we feel were not getting enough practice and review at school, we can always have professionals help us out online. Another great website is www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk, it is like an online community for graphic designers to communicate, post jobs and resumes, and to share thoughts and ideas to many graphic designers around the world.

Of course it is important to play on Adobe in your spare time, but if we are paying for school I believe that we should be getting the most out of our money and education by developing a strong base by learning the many components of these programs repetitively until it is ingrained into our heads.Anyways, I know there is a lot of help offered on the net for these programs, but I hope teachers can just take into consideration how huge and intimidating these programs can be sometimes and remember to give us the time and practice we need to master the basics first.

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