I didn't set out to become a teacher. After spending more than thirty years working in graphic design and art direction, teaching seemed like something I might do eventually, perhaps after I had slowed down a little. That plan didn't exactly survive contact with reality. Somewhere along the way I discovered that I really liked being in a room with people who were trying to figure things out, especially when those people were young designers and artists still discovering what they were capable of.

I've learned that teaching is a strange combination of knowing things and being willing to admit that you don't know everything. I can bring thirty years of professional experience into a classroom, but I can't tell a student what their work should become. I can give them tools, questions, context, and a little bit of hard-earned advice, but eventually they have to make the decisions themselves. That is where the interesting part begins.

I want my students to become better at seeing before they become better at making. That might sound backwards in a studio class, but I don't think it is. We are surrounded by an extraordinary amount of visual information, and most of us move through it without really looking. Learning to notice a relationship between shapes, recognize why a particular composition feels uncomfortable, understand why one typeface feels right and another feels completely wrong, or simply become curious about something ordinary can change the way a person works. The making tends to follow the seeing.

My classrooms are places where I want students to try things. Some of those things will be good ideas. Some will be terrible ideas. A few will be gloriously terrible ideas, which can be even more useful. I have never been particularly interested in teaching students how to avoid failure because failure is part of the process whether we like it or not. I'd rather teach them how to recognize what a failed attempt has taught them and what to do with that information. A sketch that doesn't work can still contain the beginning of something. A bad concept can lead to a better question. Sometimes the thing that looks like a mistake is simply an idea that hasn't figured out what it wants to be yet.

My professional career has also shaped the way I teach. I've spent decades working with clients, deadlines, budgets, revisions, egos, changing directions, impossible requests, and the occasional sentence that begins with, “I don't know anything about design, but I know what I like.” All of that experience matters in the classroom because making good work is only part of being a working artist or designer. You also have to communicate, present your ideas, listen to criticism, defend a decision when it deserves defending, change your mind when it doesn't, meet a deadline, work with other people, and understand that creative work exists in the real world.

That's especially important to me because I don't want to prepare students for an imaginary version of the creative profession. There is a romantic idea that artists and designers simply follow their passion and somehow the rest takes care of itself. It rarely does. Making a living from creative work requires curiosity, discipline, resilience, communication, business sense, and a willingness to keep learning long after someone has handed you a diploma. The work matters, but so does everything surrounding the work.

This is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the idea that art and design are connected. A designer can learn from a painter. A painter can learn from a designer. Both can learn from a writer, a photographer, an architect, a musician, a scientist, or the kid sitting across the table who has just made something you never would have thought to make. The boundaries between disciplines are useful when they help us understand something, but they become less useful when they start telling us what we aren't allowed to explore.

Teaching has changed me as much as I hope I've changed some of my students. Every semester brings a new collection of questions, personalities, frustrations, breakthroughs, and completely unexpected solutions. Students have a wonderful habit of reminding you that there is more than one way to see a problem. They also have an uncanny ability to expose the holes in your own thinking, which is probably good for me.

I don't expect my students to leave my classroom remembering every assignment, design principle, or piece of terminology I've thrown at them. Most of that stuff will eventually get buried under everything else life throws at them. What I hope stays is a way of looking at things. I want them to remain curious. I want them to question the obvious answer. I want them to notice things other people walk past. I want them to be willing to make something before they are completely certain it will work.

Most of all, I want them to understand that creativity isn't some mysterious substance handed out at birth to a lucky few. It is something we practice. We collect things. We pay attention. We make connections. We experiment. We get things wrong. We try again. We learn to trust our own eyes and eventually, if we're lucky, our own voice.

That's what I'm still trying to do myself.

Teaching simply gives me the privilege of doing it alongside other people.