Regarding Design Schools In USA

Hi

I am from India and want to join a good design school in USA where i can learn the stuff from the scratch.I have no prior experience in this field and right now i am working with an IT firm in India.I am good at sketching and drawing things around me.learning photoshop nowadays on my own.Please suggest me, so that i can take a step forward to make my carrier in design field.

Nitish Mayawala

I am afraid that without a specific question, your post will most likely just be ignored.
Asking the community to suggest a school where you can “learn stuff” will not yield any useful results.

Tell us more about what your area of interest is within design and how much you are willing to spend. You should realize that going to school in the US and not being a US citizen is a grueling and incredibly expensive experience. I am not saying that it can’t be worth it.

After all, I did it and loved my time in New York but it is very important to be clear on your objectives.

Also, I would suggest to search around these forums and the internet for an idea about the popular schools within the US. Your question has been asked (and answered) many many times.

I’ve read core77 blogs myself and this helped me a lot to make a good decision as what to study. Core 77 is a great help!

That was incredibly condescending, experiMental.

Nitish: the best thing you can do now is tap into the very excellent and professional community on these forums and asks as many questions as you can (all within a thread, of course… and only if a search doesn’t turn up any results) and engage us in a discussion. Reading design blogs will help, of course, but blogs will always feature the glitz and glam of design. I don’t think just reading core77 is enough.

What part of design excites you? Just making things pretty? Making it usable? The engineering side? Thinking about these questions will help you find your way to a design career. Let us see some of your sketches and Photoshop work! The best way to improve is to show your work openly and welcome people to comment on what is good and what needs work. Of course, you should also get out of your house and observe all the design (good and bad) that is out in the real world. Hopefully this will help you find out what you are really interested in: cars? consumer electronics? architecture?

Welcome to Core!

Hi

Actually the thing is i am good at sketching people and things around me and also cartoons.i was planning to get into some agency so that i can be able to find out where is my interest actually after looking the work happens there.But the problem is that i am not experienced at all so no agency finds this profile suitable to give internship.Now i am learning photoshop on my own but that will not give me sufficient exposure and ideas to improve my work.I need to learn illustrator, indesign and flash also.

Please suggest me some some good sites or blogs where a fresher find a good way to learn things around the globe.
Here in India it is too difficult to get a job where the work is good enough for you to learn things.i dont know much people here who knows how to get into a good design course.

I will jump to conclusions here and say, that what you need are not PS tutorials or Flash skills.
What you need is a decent design education.

If you are looking to get hired for a design position, then you will need a lot more than visualization skills. It seems to me that you have unfortunately hung yourself up on fancy sketches and cool PS work.
These are valid aspects to the skill set of a designer, but mean nothing if you don’t have a strong foundation in the right practices such as research, design thinking, knowledge in the history of design and so on.

As mentioned earlier, the US offers many good design courses but I am certain, so does India.
What I would do is to focus your energy towards finding a good Bachelor course that will build you from the ground up and give you foundation to purposefully utilize your sketching abilities.

Hi Nitish,
Even I am in the same boat as yours. Working in an IT firm and have very less knowledge about Industrial Design. I too am very good at Photoshop and am currently planning to learn CAD and Solidworks.

I will share what I have found out till now.

1) About schools in India -------- (NID)
Out of all the colleges in India, I guess National Institute of Design is worth the time and money, in case you have to pursue it from India. They have the best faculty and placements. But there are only15 seats for admission so its difficult getting an admit.
Admission process >> Entrance Test>> Studio Tests>> Interview (Correct me if this has changed)
I will be going for it in 2012 so let me know if you want to brainstorm.

Other options are IITs (Through CEED entrance exams)

2) About Schools in US
Following are the US schools I have gathered knowledge about in this forum and others:

Art Center College of Design
Supposed to be the best school . Has a Masters in ID of 2 years duration in trimester format(6 sems) but Very expensive.
Georgia Tech
Offers 2 years Masters in ID. But there is a preparatory course of 1 year duration if you are from an non-design field :frowning:

Do check their respective website from more info.

I am currently researching about other institutes like Pratt, Rhode Island and Savannah. Will update when I find something worth sharing.

3) About Schools in Canada

I still have to research about them.
University of Alberta and Carleton University.

Please go through posts in this forum as they have been extremely helpful to me.

If you plan to do it from the US in Fall 2012, get the GRE and TOEFL scores asap.

Also, we have to keep in mind what tarngerine said. Its very important to think in that way.


Thanks,
Ashwin

Thanks ashwin for the info…i wl search all dese courses…There are some schools which my friend suggested for portfolio creation, one is Miami Ad School and Chicago Portfolio School.but i dont knw how are they coz i m getting mixed review for them.So u can chek them out.

Nitish

Since I don’t see any information regarding University of Alberta’s design program on this website…

At the University of Alberta, it is very competitive to get accepted.
Straight out of high school, I believe they accept 12-15 people…
And 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year transfers they accept about 30-33% of the applicants (they told me it was around 200-250 ish usually)
Majority of this is based on your portfolio. They have an accepted pile, an “ok” pile, and a not accepted pile. If you happen to land into the “ok” pile, they will decide if you get in or not based on your school marks.

Last September they started a “cohort group” for people who had a really high potential of getting into BDes, where you had the advantage of taking more courses than other students to make your portfolio really stand out for next years application. I had the opportunity to be apart of this and I really recommend it to people who really want this, it can be stressful if you can’t manage your time well (SO IMPORTANT) but you learn so much about yourself and yourself as an artist. I believe they are continuing it this year and the upcoming years as well.

It’s a great school for general design, and they have one of the world’s best printmaking resources there. I know most graduates have started up many different local companies already so that’ll be awesome for you. You also work with a lot of local companies (aka, getting your name out there in the local area). So if you’re into that, you should definitely check it out.

However if you’re applying to other schools, I HIGHLY recommend you go check out their open house if you can. You’ll definitely know where you’ll want to be standing by then.