Hasta La Ideas

Want to add InDesign to the list of skills on your resume (after Adobe Illustrator and British accent, and before shuffleboard)? The mediabistro.com mothership is giving you once last chance to do so with next weekend’s final InDesign for Designers course in New York City. Art director and graphic designer Patricia Ryan will guide you through InDesign’s myriad features and capabilities to get you up and running quickly. And by the end of the weekend, you’ll be able to lay down an Inner Glow, an Outer Glow, and a Drop Shadow with the best of them. Click here to learn more and register.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nathan Shedroff, who we interviewed earlier this year, has just released the teaching materials for three design studio courses developed around his popular design books Design is The Problem, Experience Design 1.1 and Making Meaning. Published under a Creative Commons license, the material is free to use, and “meant to help design and business educators teach concepts of sustainability, meaning, and experience design.”

Shedroff’s taken this to the next level—in addition to syllabi, you can find presentations in three file formats, evaluation criteria guidelines and assignment templates, all ready to go (just fill in the instructor name) but also highly adaptable to changes in the design industry and course context. Definitely worth a look for any design educator, and the rest of us could learn a thing or two as well.

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It’s not official yet, but we have it on good authority (Women’s Wear Daily) that Michael Fink, who left his post as vice president and women’s fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue earlier this year amidst massive layoffs, has been named dean of the new School of Fashion at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Previously part of the School of Design, the School of Fashion encompasses fashion and accessory design, fashion marketing and management, and luxury fashion management. Fink, a former member of SCAD’s advisory board and a guest critic for the school’s senior fashion class, is preparing to move to Savannah (although something tells us we’ll see him back in Manhattan for Fashion Week come September). “I think it is an incredible change,” he told WWD. “Especially based on what’s going on in New York.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As an Industrial Design college student, the only chance I had to interact with Architecture–or Architorture, as they called it–students was when something in their shop broke and they came to use ours. They’d come in, bang out a couple cuts on the tablesaw and go back to their holes. We saw each other at parties, sure, but by then we were all too burnt-out to discuss our projects and the only structures we collaborated on were beer-can pyramids.

Changing times? The Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture is currently looking at restructuring their curriculum, to foment more interaction between Architecture, Industrial Design and Building Construction students.

The proposed changes include a massive overhaul of Tech’s undergraduate program to prepare students for a fast-changing work force. A new bachelor of science in design would replace the current undergraduate degrees in architecture, building construction and industrial design.

The idea is to have a sort of second Foundation Year, this one “focusing more on real-world problems and situations within architecture, construction and industrial design,” keeping students together for a bit longer before breaking them into their separate disciplines, and hopefully fostering greater understanding of each other’s fields.

So far the plan is received mixed reviews; read all about it here.

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Yesterday afternoon, we talked a little about Steve Rose‘s piece on students graduating from the Manchester School of Architecture and how gloomy everyone seemed about their post-schooling prospects. In that post, we made a weak joke (per usual) about how getting a degree in architecture right now seemed like as good of an idea as a BFA in interpretive dance. And although not exactly related, when we checked up on Jonathan Jones‘ piece, as part of the same series in the Guardian, “Class of 2009” feature, we were a little surprised to find that the students who are getting these more artistic degrees did have more positive outlooks than their architect counterparts. In fact, the ones getting perhaps the most artistic degrees, as Jones decided to talk to graduate students at Goldsmiths College, Damien Hirst‘s artsy alma mater. Maybe it’s that, when you choose to get a graduate degree in art, they know it’s going to be an uphill battle to survive from the start? Or it’s that extra batch of confidence one needs to fully commit to an artistic career (like those thousands of actors moving to Los Angeles every day)? Whatever the case, the students Jones talks to are downright hopeful and optimistic, yet remain somewhat grounded in reality, which puts us a little more at ease after spending time with Rose’s piece yesterday. But hey, because they all seem so strong, if the art doesn’t work out for them, maybe they could get into counseling job-seeking architects?