“Small screens are getting bigger, big screens are getting smaller and you know what? It’s going to end up looking like a book. We found out 500 years ago that the book is the optimal size for reading,” he says. “The best size for a page is the spread of my hand,” says Spiekermann, holding a spry example in the air. “You put 50 characters in a column and you have your point size and each language has its own easiest fonts. That all defines it. The eye, the hand, the language. Not technology.”
—Erik Spiekermann

Teaching art and design must be a mixed endeavor: Each class should be a mix of, but not necessarily equal parts, lecture, demos, and lab time whenever possible. Sprinkle in a mix of guest speakers and field trips and you have a recipe for successfully communicating the ideas you need to get across from professor to student, in a way that will lock them into their minds indelibly.

Looking at learning from another angle: I believe that the single most important skill students need to develop to become professionals, to become successful, and to be able to work well with others is the ability to communicate. It does not matter what the tools are, what the medium is, or what the message is, but whether they are able to use all of those things in concert to effectively communicate what they are trying to say.

A Creative Director from BBDO told me he had no problem giving up on several ideas he had for an advertising campaign because, “It’s my job to come up with 100 ideas only to throw away 99 of them.” That type of confidence and lack of preciousness about the work is what I strive to instill in my students: the work ethic to come up with 100 ideas fully knowing only one of them will be chosen and being completely okay with that because that is the goal.

Each assignment is scaffolded and broken into multiple steps to help reinforce the stages of creating work that I believe will best benefit them.

  • Beginning with research and data collection
  • Followed by sketching and iteration
  • Then editing and incorporating feedback into a final direction
  • Creating the final design
  • Lastly, production and delivery of the finished piece.

Whether they are taking their first-ever college course and are finishing up their final credits before graduating I believe that this methodology and workflow will be the foundation for a successful creative strategy for the rest of their careers