Good Day. My first year out of DevStudios is closing, and I want to name the things the school could not teach me, not as a complaint, but because they turned out to be the lessons that mattered most.
School gave me mock interview after mock interview, and they were genuinely good. They built the conversation and the confidence. What they could not prepare me for was the number on the other side of the table. I came from concrete, where I earned eighteen dollars an hour with my hands, and I had invested twenty thousand dollars of my own money, and ten thousand more in hardware, to become a designer. I would win an interview cleanly and be offered twelve or thirteen dollars an hour as though it were a generous gift.
I turned down a great many of those offers on principle, until honesty requires me to admit that desperation eventually won a round. I took a job at thirteen sixty-five an hour, briefly, at the Running Room, and I never once stopped hunting while I held it. Three months later I found work at eighteen dollars, exactly where I had judged my worth to be, and from there it has begun to climb. The lesson was not patience. It was refusing to accept someone else's low estimate of the work as the truth.
There is a quieter thing school could not teach me, which is how to stand near greatness without shrinking. I would study the people I admire, Edward Tufte and the way he makes data honest, the restraint that Apple and Jonathan Ive put into the world, the agencies producing work I could scarcely believe, and I would feel like an impostor in my own trade. I have learned to keep my eyes forward for exactly this reason. When I look back at my own work, I find fault. When I look ahead, I find the next thing to become.
It is humbling, too, to measure what you can make alone against what a team of twenty makes together, and to feel the gap. I am one person. I have decided the gap is not a verdict on me. It is simply the reason to get better, and to be honest about what one careful person can and cannot do.
Two things I have had to actively unlearn this year. The first is saying yes to everyone. Yes is how a young designer agrees to fifteen dollars an hour and then, through scope that quietly tripled, earns three. I am learning that a yes without a scope is not generosity. It is a slow way to come to resent your own work.
The second is my own perfectionism. Perfection is the enemy of progress, and I believe that now, even as a committed perfectionist. I hold a high standard and I will not ship work I am ashamed of. But I am learning which small imperfections will never sink a project, and to let those ones go, so the thing can actually exist in the world rather than live forever on my desk.
If I could add anything to a design school, it would have almost nothing to do with software. It would be how to pitch, how to truly listen, how to find out what a client actually needs underneath what they ask for. How to set a fair price and hold it. How to carry yourself as a luxury rather than a bargain, and to sound confident even on the day you are just beginning. I am learning all of it the slow way, in the field, and I suspect that is the only place it can really be learned.
A year ago I was certain school had prepared me. It had, for the work itself. The rest, the worth, the pricing, the standing in a room, I am building now, one hard conversation at a time. I would not trade those lessons for an easier year.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · December 2005