Holy crap, you guys—I have a new feather to put in my cap: college professor. I’m teaching Web Design 1 this semester at Parsons and my first class was this morning. I was feeling pretty Professor Frink today but I’m hoping as things progress I’ll work out the kinks and get a better handle on the public speaking side of things. It’s going to be super challenging to articulate and teach a subject that I started teaching myself 10 years ago but I’m up for the challenge… and I think I’ll learn quite a bit in the process, too! Definitely weird to be on the other side of the table. Here goes nothing…

Something I haven’t told you yet is that I’m now guest-blogging 2 times a month for Underground Art School. My first post went up Tuesday morning—and my plan is to repost them here a couple of days after, so here it goes:

Some nights you will find yourself sipping on a Red Bull trying to stay awake to finish a 2-D project due the next morning. Due to the caffeine shakes you won’t be able to fall asleep when you finally finish and wind up having a mere two hour window to nap before class. Don’t sweat, we’ve all been there before-you can and will get through this! Here’s my guide to surviving your foundation year:

Defend Your (Good) Ideas

One of the hardest parts of foundation year is being told “No” to an idea that you think is awesome. Sometimes the way you explain your best ideas make them an easy target to be shot down. Learn how to explain the most important parts of your ideas with confidence, and when you are met with resistance, learn how to defend your ideas with persistence if they are, in fact, a good idea. This leads me to my next point…

Don’t be Afraid to Throw Away an Idea You’re Invested In

Art school is about learning how to come up with a vision, following it through, realizing it’s awful, understanding why it’s awful, and tossing it to the side. You will have a lot more awful ideas than good ones when you start, you will spend a lot of time trying to make these awful ideas into good ideas, and you’ll be hesitant to cast them off due to the amount of time you’ve invested. Chalk it up to experience and move on. It is OK to have a bad idea. The best part about a bad idea is it always leads you to something better. Art School teaches you how to weed out those bad ideas from the first seed.

Critique Without Bullshitting

Nothing is worse in foundation year than staying up all night, putting your blood, sweat, and tears into finishing a project due the next morning and then you get to class and have to listen to a bunch of timid students either say nothing in response or bs about your work.
“I really like that you used green. It’s very organic”—that is not a critique, it’s a comment, and the word ‘organic’ is possibly the most overused word in the average art student’s critique lexicon. Don’t be that student. It’s OK to have an opinion in a critique, we’re not here to rub noses, we’re here to offer our honest opinions on the work presented and offer ideas on how to make it better. I remember being nervous in my foundation year that if I was to say anything too harsh that it would make it harder for me to make friends (as I would be labeled as ‘that bitch in critique this morning’). Don’t take critique comments as being a jab at you, the artist, the student. You are learning skills in foundation year, these skills and how they are applied are being critiqued. In the same vein, learn how to critique your own work in the same way.

Learn How to Generate Ideas

Always, always, always idea-generate before starting a project, regardless if it’s an applied arts or fine arts class. Even if you think you’re dead set on your initial idea; sketching, envisioning, and talking over other options might help you to make that first idea stronger or realize that there is an entirely different route you should be taking. The ideas you come up with when you are pushing yourself to brainstorm oftentimes can be the best ones. Make lists, write word associations, flip through books at the library, sketchbook, .

Save your Unused Ideas

I always wrote down lists in my sketchbooks of ideas that I—someday—wanted to pursue. Occasionally I’ll go back and read lists from freshman year and I’ll say “Wow that’s brilliant.” But more often than not I’ll say, “What the hell was I thinking?!!” No matter how small, write down your ideas that you haven’t used just yet, you’ll never know when they’ll come in handy, and if anything, they will show your progression and commitment to your art.

If you have questions you’d like answered about art school please email me! You can always check if I’ve answered it already. If your question becomes a post topic you will always remain anonymous.

A reader recently emailed me asking me what my opinion is on studying design (her question was specifically graduate school for design & management) in New York City (Pratt, Parsons, SVA, FIT) vs studying at a State University or somewhere else outside NYC.

Yes, I was the same way when faced with the prospect of going to school in the city “Design is what I want to do, and
New York City has the best opportunities for me to do it.”—and still today I think that’s pretty true. But speaking from personal experience, there are opportunities everywhere, and while in New York they may be easier to find, sometimes you need to think of what kind of life is best for you. One 10-person dorm room, two nearly-terrible apartment situations, two semesters of commuting and three years of school under my belt makes it easy for me to say that living in New York wasn’t and may never be the best living situation for me.

The three questions I wish I had asked myself are:

1. Does this school offer the best program for me or is there a College/University elsewhere that may have a curriculum better suited to my needs? While New York may have great opportunities, you are looking for a school to learn and that should be your first priority. There is plenty of time to utilize New York City for internships or jobs during summer break or post-graduation.

2. NYC has many perks—but do I have the money/energy to enjoy them? I’ve found in my experience that NYC is very much based on ‘going out’ but at the end of a long day/week of classes I rarely had the energy to go out and enjoy the museums, parks, etc that the city had to offer. That’s not to mention that I prefer having people over rather than going to bars and never had the money or desire to drink so I never got a fake ID. Again, this is based on personal preference.

3. Are you ready to live dangerously close to the life of an adult? The reader who asked me was looking for advice to make a decision on graduate schools and probably has her share of ‘life experience’… so this is more for students looking for undergrad study—are you ready to grow up and sacrifice a ‘typical’ college experience? Going to school in the city is a lot like living like an adult (minus, perhaps, your parent’s financial backing and having an actual career). I’m not sure about SVA or Pratt but Parsons has limited on-campus housing, activities, parties, and community in general. Because of this and other reasons, friendships from classes tend to be hard to extend beyond the the campus.

I’m in college now and I would like to transfer to Parsons but I wanted to know… how heavily they will weigh my GPA? Do you think it will have an affect on their decision?

This was one of the biggest questions I had when I applied to Parsons, too. I wasn’t a terrible student in high school, but I wasn’t a star-student either. I’m not an admissions counselor, but if you are worried about your GPA, I think you should focus on what other aspects balance out that weakness. Obviously you can make a really excellent portfolio or home test (I’m not even sure if that is required for transfer, is it?) but have you thought about how some of your extracurricular activites or other interests make you a well rounded student that is qualified to transfer into Parsons? For the record, I had a 2.65 GPA when I graduated high school but I balanced that out with starting a music magazine at my school, helping out the art department, and doing a French exchange program. Also you might be able to say that the reason why you aren’t doing up to your personal standards is because you aren’t being pushed by the curriculum at your current school (and that you think Parsons will challenge you to be a better student and designer.) Good luck!

Do you have any advice on what major should I take if I want to work in magazines?

In order to answer your question, I need a few answers first. What type of magazine are you interested in working for; fashion, art, technology? Even still, there are many subgroups to these broad content ideas; circulation size, demographic, and niche market. For example, I intern at W magazine, which is a rather large fashion publication under the umbrella of Conde Nast. The target audience is wealthy, established, older women who can afford the crystal-encrusted dresses and Michael Kors’ mink jackets housed within its pages. However, W’s target audience couldn’t be further from my actual lifestyle; a broke college student who can barely afford the $34 nylon tricot leggings from American Apparel. Regardless, I still find inspiration for my illustrations, design, and dream wardrobe from the pages of W magazine.

It also is important to note what type of responsibilities you want to hold at that magazine. Do you want to book the models for the editorials? Design the layout? Price out the cost of rights to all the images used in the pages? Be the photographer hired to shoot the editorials? Be commissioned to make an illustration for an article? Do you want to run the print shop responsible for producing thousands of magazines? It all relies on where your passion and talent lives. There is a whole magnitude of art-related jobs that can be related to magazines in some way, shape, or form.

With that being said here is a quick rundown of a few ways to apply different majors at art schools to working at a magazine:
Communication Design:Creative Directors, Art Directors, and Designers; manage the look and feel of the way the content is laid out on a page. Could also work on the website of the magazine, managing web content and layout.
Fashion Design: Design the clothes featured within the pages of the magazine.
Photography: Take photos of the clothes and models featured within the pages of the magazine. Take shots of interiors, accessories, etc. Possibly find and hire photographers to take photos for the issue.
Design and Management: Public relations, bookings, money and more of the ‘business’ side of the magazine.
Illustration: Draw/paint/create a piece of work to illustrate the articles in the magazine.