Design Studio

Goal

This is what I am known for on campus, and it is the part of teaching I care about most.

Put students in front of actual clients and actual deadlines, so they graduate with professional work rather than class assignments. It is a requirement, not an extra: every student in the program completes client work in the studio or an internship placement before they graduate. While the studio ran as a course, every project came through me, and every project on this page was made inside it.

The design of it is the point. In an ordinary assignment the instructor is the audience, so the student is really performing for a grade. Here a client is waiting, the work goes out into the world, and the student has to defend the choices to someone who did not assign them. The assessment is the professional task. There is no way to fake it, no way to paste it, and nothing a model can hand back that a client will accept.

Audience

Students first, and not only design students. The studio is a multidisciplinary group: film, photography, animation, graphic design, and sound design students, who we bring in often on the videos, because a real client brief rarely stays inside one discipline. Campus partners second: the offices, programs, and committees who need this work and have no creative staff of their own.

Process

Students work in teams, and one student on each team serves as the project manager. That student writes the design brief and the timeline, interfaces directly with the client, and keeps the team on track. The brief names the client, the goal, the approach, and what the client actually needs; the timeline carries the proof cycles, the client approval gates, and the delivery date.

While it ran as a course, the instructor’s job was to decide which projects the studio took on and in what order, and to hold the standard. The students’ job was to run it.

The boards below are the working evidence, not a reconstruction. Both were built by student teams while the work was live.

So they leave with two things, not one. They leave with the work, and they leave having practiced real project management methodology. Designers are rarely taught any of it, and it is the thing that decides who gets to lead.

Which is why it belongs on a student’s resume as an internship, because that is what it is. They had a client, a brief, a deadline, and a deliverable that shipped. The only difference between this and an internship is that it happened to be worth credit.

Technology

• Student teams run on Basecamp, Slack, Miro, and Discord.
• The tools change with the brief, because the projects range so widely:
  • Graphic design and publications: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, and Canva.
  • Motion and video: After Effects and Premiere.
  • 3D: Cinema 4D.
  • Games and interactive: Unity.
  • Web: Drupal.

Outcomes

Now a grant-funded paid studio. The model outgrew the course: we wrote a grant, it came through, and the class no longer runs. The studio employs four paid students each semester, drawn from film, photography, animation, and design, doing client work for a wage instead of for credit. Students who want the experience without the job take an internship placed with a client instead.

A film faculty member runs it now, advised by three faculty. Handing it off was the point. The work students made inside the course is what made the case for funding it, and it outlasted any one instructor.

A recent hire shows what the full path can do. A digital media student was hired as an associate marketing designer at Workday after a year as one of the studio’s paid student designers, leading the student design team for The Traveler and completing an internship with a program sponsor. Her hire reflects a student who took advantage of everything the program offers, not a two-year degree alone.

The pieces below are a selection, followed by a client list that names each client once, though many came back year after year.