a bit to much CAD emphasis but not a bad little guide.
PS: I came across this after googling ‘how to be a food critic’…which ehow also has over here
Agree with Wolfy…far too much emphasis on CAD. Yeah, it’s imperative that you know one of the major modeling programs at an advanced level, but ehow doesn’t go into detail about how important sketching and being able to quickly communicate your ideas and aesthetics to others. Most people don’t have the ability to visualize things or concepts that don’t exist.
Also, ehow says that an industrial design degree can be substituted with an enginnering or architectural degree. Um, no, it can’t. They actually suggest art and design schools as a second place to earn a degree.
They forget Step 8: Discover that you’ll never make enough starting off to pay back your school loans, and if you got your Master’s as your first ID degree you will be considered over-qualified (or too expensive) for entry-level positions and you’ll have to get involved in other areas of the design business if you want to be able to support your family; declare personal bankruptcy; deliver newspapers at night; dream of actually designing your own products while your creative soul slowly whithers away and dies!
I think I’m joking,
mothy
Step 3.5: Develop an unhealthy addiction to caffiene that will cost you thousands of dollars per year in coffee, red bull, mountain dew, and crack cocaine.
Gaygaruda’s point on the masters degree is interesting though. While interviewing masters candidates even if their work was very good it seems that they’re being held to a much higher standard then someone straight out of school.
hoho…excellent!
I registered with eHow and posted a comment.
nice comment…I gave it some stars. It should be a wiki page really…to allow people with some more knowledge to improve it.
Hmmmm, maybe they should have put less emphasis on CAD and more on getting as many internships under your belt as possible.
Lets face it, theres no right or wrong way to be a designer. Different fields have different requirements in terms of skillsets, and a knowledge of CAD really is essential in most of those fields.
Remember they’re talking about learning CAD at the high school age, and I completely agree. CAD is very accessible nowadays and I can say from personal experience that learning it early (started playing with 3d around age 13) was HUGELY advantageous to my academic and professional development.
So at a high school level, I’d certainly recommend learning those kinds of skills, because it’s easy to pick up and helps you down the road. Design drawing is about communication, and while its still a primary tool, it’s very easy to be mediocre at drawing but still get your idea across. If you’re mediocre at CAD that means that something that you now need to produce can’t get made, and you have a problem. If your line weight on the sketch you show to the guy in marketing isn’t Art Center quality, that won’t ruin you.
And while I wouldn’t SUGGEST that someone who wants to go into design gets an arch/eng degree, its certainly been done, especially in certain fields (furniture, mechanical products, etc).