Teaching at MICA this fall
I am excited and honored to announce that I’ll be teaching a course, GD301A, at the Maryland Institute College of Art this fall semester. MICA’s undergraduate and graduate programs have consistently been ranked among the nation’s top programs in visual arts and design; MICA is the oldest fully accredited, degree-granting college of art in the country. It is an amazing opportunity to teach ‘web design’ at such a prestigious institution, one so well dedicated to the visual arts and design.
The opportunity is great both for the students and myself; I’ll have the ability to adjust the curriculum to focus on the fundamentals of ‘web design’ in a real world context. I’ll be addressing ‘web design’ from the discovery, strategy, information architecture, visual design and technical development aspects. We’ll be evaluating business objectives, user personas, use cases, content and content hierarchy as well the technical implementation of a project whose total parts compliment and are a part of the design process. And of course, the primary focus will be on the visual design.
This course and many more like it at MICA are a great step forward within educational institutions to help promote standards-based, forward thinking, and intelligent ‘web design’.
I asked the question recently, “do web designers need degrees?” The question sparked a great discussion from all sides – I think MICA and institutions similar are helping move that discussion in the right direction, a direction pointing towards an answer of ‘yes’. The debate really lingers around the lack of experience of faculty and an institution’s ability to keep up with such a fast paced industry, that and just offering the opportunity in the first place. I am honored to be a part of this progressive movement and am excited about this emerging shift within educational institutions across the country.
On a side-note: while at MICA last week I had the opportunity to preview their upcoming redesign of http://mica.edu, curtsey of HappyCog. It is a great piece of work and everyone should keep an eye out for it; I hear the launch is scheduled for sometime in October.
- August 11th, 2008
- 10comments
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A great opportunity: many of the local universities here teach ‘web page development’ modules in Dreamweaver tables!
Congratulations!
@Richard and Victoria,
Thank you.
I’ll be using Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator for the most part on the visual design side. I will be using Dreamweaver for technical design, because it is a commonly used application in the educational space — but will be showing how to use Dreamweaver to hand-code and get out of the “visual” view and work primarily within the “code” view.
Congrats Martin, I am very jealous.
I find there is nothing wrong with starting out with Dreamweaver, that is where I start out, think it was interdev at the time and I am still using it. It is a good stepping stone, but I like you would stress the hand-coding aspect.
@Benjamin,
Thank you! I also still use Dreamweaver, but I am a person of habit. It is what I first learned HTML on and I am used to the color coding, auto-closing of my tags and even the built-in FTP client — just am comfortable using the program after all these years, I don’t want to invest the time into something new at the moment.
As bad as the visual view is in Dreamweaver, I did find its rendering engine useful back when I had to code for IE5.2 on the mac and even IE6 — if Dreamweaver liked how my CSS layout looked, the odds are that everyone else would as well.
But, I agree, Dreamweaver is a great tool to learn on, to get started out on — hand coding in something like notepad for a designer can be a bit overwhelming at first.
Congratulations, Martin! MICA will be ever-the-better for your instruction :-).
Congratulations! Now if only UMD had a teacher like you…
@Zvi, thanks! I know what you mean .. I went to UMD and well … as a result and a self-taught web designer / front-end developer. It’s been like 5 years since I graduated, so I wonder if things have changed; but as of 2003 there were no courses in web design or HTML. There were however a couple small stints of HTML in the Gemstone and Honors programs though.
Martin–
I’d love to see a wrap-up of what you thought about the teaching experience.
I know my expectations were a bit, well, unique from the reality of teaching when I taught a few html/design classes at the Corcoran…
i know you’re busy, but just a thought!
Chris,
Thanks for keeping my on my toes. I will write up a follow-up; it was an amazing experience. Just finished my official last day in December with a student portfolio review; was extremely insightful.
Really is a group of the next top talent.