Let's talk about Design School
Thu, 21 May 2026
It's graduation season and every year I get asked to review a bunch of portfolios. It's also layoff season (again) and so there are even more folks than usual trying to figure out how to show off what they know and how they work. (Yes, I will review your portfolio if you send me a nice email, aren't a jerk about it, and are ok waiting in the times when I'm busy.)
Let's just kick off what might be a contentious blog post by making a defensive humble brag: I am a graduate of a traditional art school design program and a big, research-one university engineering program. I also dropped out of two different schools' computer science undergrad programs. So as a student, I have a pretty broad experience with the "traditional" ways most digital designers get trained. I also taught design at a university. So please believe me when I tell you that the traditional path for training digital designers (I'm including you too, my front-end engineer friends) is leaving students with huge gaps in their skill set. Especially now, in the era of GenAI, when every school administrator seems to be convinced the future for all their students is some flavor of "prompt engineer" or I guess maybe "UBI recipient"? It's unclear what they think the endgame is. They deserve to get boo'd, is what I'm saying.In an ideal world designers and most developers would be skilled tradespeople and learn in an appentriceship program that pays a living wage, avoiding the current system altogether.
This doesn't mean I think you should drop out of college if you are currently a student seeking a degree. Remember, I own two and I can tell you the job market has only gotten more obsessed with you having one in the last 30 years (especially if you're not a rich white guy who as impressed a VC.) A college degree is, unfortunately, a required key to unlock a chance at a living wage as a designer, and that was true even 25 years ago. Why do you think I went back to art school after dropping out of those CS programs? I wanted a full-time job with health insurance instead of freelancing and was told "[my] portfolio is great, but we don't hire FTEs without a degree." I broad-based education is also just a good thing to have, even though it doesn't have an directly applicable advantage to our job market most days.Not everything you do has to be profitable. Stay in school is what I'm saying, just know the reason you're there.
Cool, so we've established the current system is bad, not really a revelation. Some details would be nice, huh? If you want the long, detailed version ask any design or engineering leader about the long list of things they know they have to spend the first year teaching any junior they hire. The short version is: your projects are generally very small, you get very little practice collaborating and none with people who have different training or goals than you, and every project you do in school exists in a perfectly calm utopia.
You certainly learn a bunch of super important basic stuff (mostly technical/tool focused) and are given opportunities to practice with all the projects you do for your various classes. Plus, these days the university will often sell your training labor to some company in exchange for a "realistic" project that the sponsoring company will own completely, meaning you will have paid to do that work for them. These are all valuable lessons about being a professional designer/developer (especially that last one.)
It's not your fault. It's mostly not the instructors' fault (they are statistically likely to be adjunct, which is a college professor that gets treated and paid like a McDonalds employee.) That said, these are the problems that are at the root of pretty much any questions you ask about your portfolio and how to improve it if you're in the first one to three years of your career. We, people who hire, used to solve this by making sure you were only competing against other people with similar levels of experience. For a variety of reasons we now make most of you figure it out yourself while you face off for jobs against people with 5 years of experience. (We are an industry that has declared war on it's young, sorry to be the one to tell you.)
Look, it's hard out there right now, but this isn't a message of doom and gloom in this graduation season. There is stuff you can do in-between filling our your 100th job application to start filling in the gaps your school left for industry to fill as if industry hasn't given up on training. How do you stand out in your job search? Know someone who already works there. (Seriously, this isn't a joke.) But how do you stand out among the other people who also know someone who already works there? Address the gaps.
Gap: Your projects are generally very small
I don't remember who tweeted it, but the tweet went something like: "You spent 20 hours on that project? That means it took you until lunch on Wednesday." It was the classic 2010s "tough love" tweet that kinda sucks when you look back at it now, but the point is an important one. A standard full-time work week in the US is 40 hours (yes, I acknowledge this number is often not accurate.) What feels like forever in a class project turns out to actually not be that much work in the professional world. If you are being evaluated against people with work experience, they are going to have much larger projects that show much more thinking than you do by default. The advantage they have is time, not that someone was paying them. They were doing the thing for way longer than you were before they stopped and put it in their portfolio.
The solution to this is simple, but not easy: Do bigger projects. Scope is the the main benefit you get when you follow the often given "Find a charity to do some pro-bono work for to fill out your portfolio" advice. The project being "real" (what even is real? Nobody paid me to build this but it is real.) isn't what people reading about it later are responding to, it's that the project will be realistically sized. It will have a bunch of stuff nobody actually thought about until you did when you ran into it while designing the parts someone had thought about. It will have boring, super obvious parts that you will in no way be able to claim any kind of insight or innovation went into it. It will contain not only a larger scope, but it will contain revisions! Especially if you're doing it for free and you didn't sign a contract limiting the number of revisions, oh wow will it contain revisions!! (always have a contract.)
You don't need to find a pro-bono client to do this, but working for a real client is the fastest way to fill all three of the gaps in one go. For this one specifically all you need is time. Remember, when someone with a full-time design or engineering job says they just finished an 8 week project you can assume that was at least 160 hours of work (but probably more.) So find or make up a project that tkaes at least that long.
Gap: You get very little practice collaborating and none with people who have different training or goals than you
I am a vocal proponent of collaboration over competition at work, and I will tell you I still hate almost every group project I ever did when I was in school. As a teacher, I understand why the group project exists: it's the best analog we have for working with others, students have different strengths, and when you do a group project you don't have to grade as many projects as you would if everyone did their own. Group projects are basically nothing like working with other people at a job. Rarely in your professional life will you get asked to work exclusively with a group of people who all have similar backgrounds, training, and goals to you. What would be the point? Most groups you actually have to work in are full of people with different goals to yours and who, at best, understand what a stereotype of you knows and does for a living. Yes, even when you're all working at the same company. Especially when you're all working at the same company. If your internship was a good one and they did right by you, you were isolated from this reality of the workplace. Interpersonal conflict is the name of the game in the word of making digital stuff, because it takes so many different skill sets to actually produce most digital stuff. Learning to navigate it and make friends and allies is the most important set of skills you will ever have and it becomes more important the more senior you are.
Starting to work on this gap is a bit more complex. You can't really just go out and find people with lots of different backgrounds to you and do a project. I mean, you totally could, that's just called starting a company, but there are a lot of reasons you probably shouldn't do that right out of school. Your best bet is to get feedback from a lot of different people who are like those people you will have to work with. Are you a designer with an art degree? Find some developers and sales-oriented business people to give you their honest feedback. Are you an engineer with a CS or EE degree? Go find those business people and artists and really listen to what they have to say. DO NOT ARGUE WITH THEM THEY ARE DOING YOU A FAVOR. Take the feedback, thank them (mean it), and then really think about the parts that surprised you. The parts that made you feel defensive. The parts that you wanted to roll your eyes at (but you didn't roll your eyes because those people were helping even if your ego made you forget that for a second.) How would you handle that feedback if you had to follow it? What arguments would you make to try to convince them? What things did they say that, once you sat with it for a few minutes, turned out to totally be true?
You're collaboration shadowboxing now. Is it the same as cross-functional collaboration. No, but it's a good place to start. It's also way less stressful that really having to negotiate those kinds of hard conversations, and if that isn't something you feel comfortable with, this can be a good way to ease in to learning those skills.
Gap: Every project you do in school exists in a perfectly calm utopia
I have never seen the school project that was refactored and salvaged the week before the end of the semester because the department chair decided the strategy has changed. Or the side project that never saw the light of day because the whole team was laid off before it could launch. In school you never really fail due to forces outside your control, and that is a great thing. (Again, your internship should have shielded you from this reality if they were doing their jobs.) Not only would it be cruel, it would also be counterproductive to try to get people to learn in an unstable environment. Rolling with the punches is a big part of being a professional though, and being able to demonstraight this is one of those things that gets people hired. "Everybody has plans until they get hit the first time" (That's the actual Tyson quote btw) is an oft misquoted piece of folk wisdom for a reason.
This is a tough one to do on your own, since it's not really an unplanned change if you're the one who is making it. Being able to let go of the plan and move forward quickly is as much mental discipline as it is any working on particular skill. It's about not panicking when things change, not letting yourself get trapped in denial (getting stuck complaining about how stupid some new thing is while not doing anything is a form of denial.) You don't have to do design to practice that (and practice is where all those answers you give in interviews really come from.) For years I have suggested to designers they should take at least one improv class, and so I will suggest that to you (thus fulfilling my obligations as a theater kid.) One of the most useful things I was forced to do in art school was draw 100 completely different variations of a 1 sq. inch drawing of a tea pot, tea cup, and saucer. I hated this assignment at the time, and it took the class three weeks to actually complete it because the first two times we turned it in it was quickly returned to us with big red X's over the drawings that were deemed "too similar" by the teacher, leaving us with fewer than 100 drawings. Years later, I used this assignment when I was a teacher because I can trace my ability to accept defeat and just "draw more tea pots" to this assignment. Ultimately it's about getting the reps in, both at doing the thing and at failing at it. You eventually internalize that it's not that big a deal and you just draw another tea pot... or whatever it is your boss is asking you to do.
In the best version we would be a skilled trade with a fully functioning apprenticeship program that doesn't leave you with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and no gaps like these. That is sadly not the world we live in, (yet?) Until we get there, we need to figure out ways to keep improving on the skills that matter, which are usually not a tool but a process. Happy graduation season to the class of 2026, keep on booing the out of touch commencement speakers.
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