Although my degree is not explicitly in graphic design, it shares many similarities. Just like my University, several schools offer degrees similar to graphic design that will still help you find a job in the field. My degree is a Bachelor’s in Digital Media, which could be described as a combination of graphic design and programming. This degree is offered in my home state of Kansas at K-State Polytechnic. Along with K-State, I will be discussing schools that offer degrees in this field of study.

Finding the right school can be difficult. Take me, for example. When I graduated high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study. I ended up going to a community college to get my general studies courses out of the way. This would allow me to focus on my degree related classes in my later semesters. Although this plan did work out for me by helping me find what I wanted to do, it prevented me from graduating with a Bachelor’s degree within the four-year typical timespan. This could be avoided by starting with the right college or university towards the beginning of your college career.

When looking for websites that help find colleges, I stumbled across an issue that might not be an issue for everyone. Several of the sites I visited had me answer several questions such as what my email was, where did I plan on going to school, what degree did I want. For some, this may be fine, however, for me, it was not. I wanted to see what schools offer graphic design degrees, but I had to jump through numerous groups to get there. Here are the websites I’d recommend when looking for a school. Study.com asks some similar questions to the other sites but not as many or as invasive of privacy. Within five minutes, they had already suggested five potential schools based on my answers. Another good option is collegchoice.net. Both options provide an extensive range of schools that can be filtered to fit your needs, such as location or current education level.

Although you may have found some potential schools online, you won’t know for sure if it’s the right one for you without a tour. This may be in person if the campus is close enough, but a lot of major Universities now offer digital tours that let you see the campus. You should also talk with some of the staff and current students to find out if the campus culture is the right fit for you. Where ever you decide to go, just know that it’s ok to change your mind on things such as college, or your degree. Just make sure you find the right fit for you, and it will all be worth it.

In my last post, I discussed finding sources of inspiration. That challenge becomes a lot easier if you have specific guidelines set for you to begin with, such as a class assignment. In this post, I will talk about one of the assignments I worked on when working towards my Digital Media degree.

Here is my final project from my sophomore semester in which we were tasked with redesigning the website for a well-known company. We had the options of Coca Cola, American Airlines, or Nike. A majority of my class went with either Coke or Nike, so I decided to pick American Airlines. In my opinion, when I chose American Airlines, some of the design choices were already selected for me. For starters, when looking at the color scheme, it was already chosen to work with red, white, and blue. Second, I knew what the mission of their website was to sell travel tickets. This made it easy to decide what content should be available on the front page, here is their current website.

Although I am proud of this assignment, I also understand that it does not look the best. The main reason for this is I wanted to create as much of the content from scratch as possible. For am an inexperienced student, this leads to spending a majority of the time figuring out what tools I need to create what I want. For this project, I used Adobe Illustrator. The only things I did not create for this was the plane, the large image in the background, and the small images of airports at the top. From this project, I had learned a lot about what not to due, such as creating everything from scratch for a prototype when there are creative commons resources available for this purpose.

I’d highly encourage you all to try redesigning a companies website. You do not necessarily have to use software such as Illustrator to create it but use it as a source of both practice and also a way to find out if you enjoy this line of work. I hope you enjoyed me sharing some of my class experiences, please let me know if you’d like to hear more.