Be a design student

In some areas, school has been in full swing for a month; in others, it only started last week. Either way, it's safe to say that plenty of college freshmen are just getting the lay of the land. Some have no idea what their major will be. Others know exactly what they want to do: design stuff.

Core77 has created a guide called Hack 2 School, for all those incoming design majors. It's worth checking out because, while its specific focus is industrial design, it has plenty of useful material for all art and design students, and even some ideas that will be appreciated by college students in general, like those for laundry, living in small spaces, and making good meals with few ingredients.

If you're a graphic design major, for example, you can assume that you won't want some of the "design library" books and will probably be replacing them with titles like The Elements of Typographic Style (or any of the approximately eight thousand creativity and idea-generation books that I owned as a graphic design major). Art major? Well, you'll need some design skills too, and you'll need to document your work with a good camera, sound smart in critiques, get inspiration, and learn to be productive.

But what if you're not even in college any more, and have no interest in a career in design? I'm assuming that, as a DIY Life reader, you're interested in making things, some of which will be projects you come up with on your own. That means that design education will help you out, and Hack 2 School is for you, too. If nothing else, you'll enjoy the Cheat Sheet, which is more about useful skills in general than design in particular. They mention a bunch of other DIY sites, too.

(Hack 2 School was the source of the ReadyMech paper models I wrote about a few days ago. See how cool it is?)

[via CRAFT.]

Source