Your Future Designers

While I was in New York the other day at the In-Plant Graphics Conference, I listened in on an interesting panel discussion. One of the speakers, Michael Josefowicz, is a professor at Parsons School of Design, where he spends his time preparing the next wave of graphic artists for careers in this industry.

He grabbed my attention when he said his students are no longer interested in Web site design; that was something they did for fun in high school. But they were very excited when they got the opportunity to create and produce a 52-page magazine as part of their course.

Print, he stressed, is new to them and therefore more exciting.

For those of us in the printing industry, this is indeed an encouraging development.

Professor Josefowicz went on to say several more interesting things. His students created their magazine using a completely digital workflow and outputted it on a Xerox iGen3. They have no knowledge of a "traditional" workflow. Unlike those who have spent years using cameras and film, and are now wrestling with whether or not to move to a digital workflow, for these students that decision is obvious. In fact, there is no decision to make.

And these are the men and women who are going to be applying for jobs with you in a few years.

The professor is teaching his designers-to-be that PDF is the only acceptable format. If their print provider can't handle PDFs, he is telling them to find another printer.

Josefowicz also believes it is the responsibility of the designer to create files that work. So he teaches his students that if they send their PDF to the printer and the press proof does not look like they expected, it is their job—not the printer's—to fix the PDF and resend it.

These are just a few of the things your future employees are learning and will be expecting. Will you be ready for them?