Three minute heroes
I decided that this year I would spend more time in universities and with students than I would at conferences. Maybe that’s because my son’s a student and I’d like to think that he’d appreciate a visiting lecturer. Maybe it’s because I’m not ready for the pressure of larger events yet. Whatever the reason, this week was all about students and my visits to Winchester School Of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Late last Wednesday, we made our way south, via London Waterloo, to the beautiful city of Winchester. On Thursday, while my wife had a well-deserved spa day in the hotel, I visited Winchester School Of Art. It’s been around twenty-five years — when I was an art student — since I stepped foot inside an art school. It felt great to be back, instantly familiar, although so much has changed. Technology was the biggest difference. Macs were everywhere, of course, but alongside traditional printmaking studios, Winchester School Of Art also has large format and 3D printers that I would’ve loved to use back in the eighties.
I wasn’t just there for a tour. In the morning I held a two-hour mini workshop on designing ‘atmosphere’ to a group of thirty or so graphic design students. They were a fun group and I enjoyed talking about our approach to web design has changed so much, in particular the shift from designing ‘canvas in’ to ‘content out.’ In the afternoon I spoke to another group of students and answered questions about what it’s been like to run a small design business from home for fifteen years. I talked about what’s been great and what’s gone wrong and the lessons we’ve all learned as a family as we worked from home and ‘lived at work.’
On Friday I spent the day with my good friends at Manchester Metropolitan University. Third year students had been given the task of researching a topic, producing a piece of work and then documenting what they’d made in the form of a poster PDF. Their topic groups ranged from general HTML and CSS to responsive design, programming and media such as responsive images. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, each student was asked to give a three minute presentation to an audience made up of their peers, first and second years, staff and me. I was very impressed, not only with the quality of work produced, but by the presentations themselves. The three minute format seemed to be the perfect length for a mini talk too.
There were talks from people who obviously knew their subject inside-out but were understandably nervous about presenting. Then there were talks from people with big personalities who seemed to be full of confidence. I half wondered if I was watching a future generation of conference speakers, but then I realised how important it is to practice talking about work in daily life too. Whether that be pitching for new business or presenting work to clients.
At the end of each topic group, I said a few words about what I’d heard and tried to fill in any gaps with mentions of articles and links I thought would be useful. Staff gave me £20 gift certificates to give away to the person I thought gave the best talk in each group and at the end I gave away copies of Hardboiled Web Design and Smashing Book 3 to the two people I thought gave the best talks of the day.
(While we’re talking about books, after Christmas we cleared a few dozen books off the shelves in our studio and I took them for MMU students on Friday. If you’ve web design or development books that you’ve read and might be useful for students, please donate them to your local university.)
I thoroughly enjoyed visiting Winchester and MMU this week and I hope that the students I met got something out of what I had to say.