I recently had a discussion with one of my professors from Iowa State University. She was asking what skills I felt ISU needed to better teach to prepare students for the real world. Which got me to thinking about the things that I have needed to learn in the past ten months at Oxide. I spent most of my four years learning about typography, proportions, and print design. And while I still utilize those skills, I’ve had to learn how to translate those skills to the web.

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It can be disorienting to think that design is important. Not because design isn’t important — but because it’s easy to misunderstand what design is. …

For most of us, landing a job in design didn’t just happen. In our field, there is an abundance of applicants and a minimal number of openings. This means that you’re going to have to do everything you can to even get noticed. If you’re getting ready to take the plunge into the frigid waters of the design job market, following these guidelines will help you to get noticed. …

This is a sequel to the first post in this series: Care about your work — which continues to be the most important lesson we have for you.

But caring is more complicated than that. When you start caring, you lose the ability to evaluate your work independently of your personal investment in it. …

At Oxide, we have a love/hate relationship with design awards. We have a good number of accolades laying around at this point, but I’m not sure what they’ve ever really gotten us, save for a quickly fleeting ego boost.

In the local (and probably national) design schools, it seems like there’s a great deal of importance placed on the winning of awards. Students are encouraged (and sometimes required) to enter competitions held by local organizations and national publications. But a student winning an award probably does much more to promote their educational institution than it does to bolster the career prospects of the student. Design employers know enough to take student design awards with a grain of salt; prospective design students (and their parents) often don’t have enough experience to avoid being star-struck by a school hallway lined with award plaques. …

While judging the 2010 Nebraska Student ADDY Awards, I was inspired to address the student readers of our blog. While Joe has been the regular author of our Hey Students! series, he has graciously allowed me to contribute to his already great student reference.

There’s no easy way to say this. If you didn’t already know, there simply aren’t a ton of desirable jobs just waiting to be filled by design students. Knowingly or not, you have signed up for an extremely competitive field where mediocrity will likely mean a career in something other than design. I really hope this didn’t come as a shock to you, but if it did, there’s still hope. …