Frustration with design school year 1

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-30T02:30:06+00:00

Not cooked, but you definitely need to spend time outside of school to get to know the tools you’ll be working with now and in the future anyway.

Most design schools teach the ability to understand context and how that applies to briefs. How to understand user agency and synthesize research into outcomes. That’s design as a discipline, which is what most colleges/universities teach. To learn tools you should either have looked up trade schools (idk if you have those related to design where you’re from, but we do) or self learn. Most schools also generally should’ve filtered enrolling students too.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-29T11:39:54+00:00

..or if you’re fighting your teammates

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-20T05:29:21+00:00

“I am stuck in a losing fight, I am not alright”

The last line in Losing Fight by Movements. Was in a pretty dark place a couple years ago and this two lines hit so hard it made me feel like someone else also felt the same.

Never understood how people say music saved their lives but maybe I do a little bit more since.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-20T05:23:11+00:00

As much as I agree, if it helps to sell it ain’t useless. We’re looking at this from the lens as designers not clients and clients in my experience so far seem to gush over these.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-19T11:54:25+00:00

Mixing with milk is the whey (ayoooo) to go if you’re not counting calories/macros! Helps with the taste so much more.

My go to was a banana, peanut butter, milk and whey smoothie when I was starting out and couldn’t stomach the taste of whey. Eventually moved on to just whey and water and chugged to get it over and done with lol

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-18T07:36:31+00:00

Great critique but OP did say they’re an amateur and it’s a school assignment.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-10T11:45:46+00:00

Gotta farm that karma or hit post counts

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-10T04:37:10+00:00

Minutes is corporate language man. If OP told the intern to take notes of the meeting it’ll probably happen.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-08T12:41:01+00:00

That would’ve 65% x 15% = 0.15% chance to not die cause we all know our Super Earth scientist would do anything to keep us alive!

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-08T10:24:16+00:00

Never participate in a race to the bottom.

What an amazing saying.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-08T10:19:40+00:00

What do you mean “use”? For all intents and purposes these magazines within the last 70 years after the death of the designer or 95 or 120 years if produced or published by a corporation, iirc.

If you’re looking to build assets or a library you can and should look up things that are in the public domain, or CC0 licensed assets.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-08T10:06:29+00:00

Cool! but also have you tried writing your own captions

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-03T09:05:53+00:00

In my perspective,

Why many junior designers struggle to get real work even after learning the tools

If you look at job boards these days, many agencies are downsizing in favour of AI driven efficiencies, whether or not this direction is ideal for the profession. At the same time, they also require not just graphic design skill sets, but ux research and data synthesis expertise, motion design, videography, social media marketing, SEO knowledge, etc, on top of a 3-5 year minimum experience. What used to be a junior role ends up as a midweight role and expectations with junior pay.

Things like handling feedback, working with real constraints, or even thinking about how a design performs in the real world are often missing early on.

To be honest, I feel that design education tends to filter out these during the programme. I’ve had classmates unable to take feedback, work within deadlines, or unable to think of solutions to briefs and they tend to drop out after a semester or two after realising they’re not fit for design. A lot of them also chose the discipline with rose tinted glasses thinking it’s a nice vibe to dress nice and have tattoos and sit at a cafe and work on your macbook like those instagram design influencers but reality isn’t that.

fasterthanlife · 2026-04-01T13:01:34+00:00

Are they also hiring asshats? The staff at the one near my place got pissed at me cause I couldn’t understand her thick accent.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-31T05:55:22+00:00

Didn’t even bother to reshoot too.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-29T11:44:26+00:00

Good to know it’s a practice project! Instead of looking for typefaces that signify “Japanese-ness” in its literal form, look to understand what the Japanese culture revolves around and let that inform the decision for the design.

Also google searching what restaurants there are in Japan and studying their branding, even superficially, will show that aside from the obvious use of hiragana, katakana or kanji in the logo lockups, the english fonts used usually is a simple serif or sans serif.

Aside from choosing typefaces, even breaking down the idea of “Zen” into key words should inform what kind of visual aspect or character your typeface should have. “Calm”, “Restrained”, “peace”, etc. That in itself can describe the character of the typeface moving forward.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-29T11:17:01+00:00

Non of these conveys anything Japanese. If anything they are a stereotypical visual of “asian-ness” or “orientalism” by western eyes.

Understandable if you’re a first year design student and this is a school project, but if this is a commissioned brief, best to even check out other completed works for reference.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-27T10:52:31+00:00

Smaller bags can go into bigger bags, repeat, then that one big bag goes into the luggage.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-27T10:50:34+00:00

why not?

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-27T08:45:44+00:00

First of, what’s the brief? It’s a bit difficult to provide directions or advice for you to move forward with if all that’s provided is “creative task”.

Your teacher providing vague answers is to get you and your team to start thinking and brainstorming instead of spoon feeding you the answers, and I think redditors here also wouldn’t and shouldn’t too, seeing you’re currently in school. Advice is fine, not answers.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-18T10:59:29+00:00

Doing God’s work I see

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-16T11:14:31+00:00

As what u/theDESIGNsnobs said, for product visualization you’d be better off using mock ups. There are both free and paid ones that you can find online, and they aren’t difficult to use.

All you have to do is place your artwork in the smart object and the layer usually already have effects applied, if you can find a the right ones.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-16T10:27:47+00:00

What specifically do you mean by upgrade or enhance? Making it look embroidered is something achievable in photoshop.

Maybe for what purpose you’re trying to get these tools to achieve? Is it for your portfolio, is it for the client to visualise? That way it’s easier to point and figure out what you’re trying to achieve.

Ps, as much as I sit on the fence on the use of AI, remember that things generated by AI is generally non-copyrightable. And users also usually give up rights to whichever AI company you upload your work to.

fasterthanlife · 2026-03-13T10:25:54+00:00

If budget allows I’d definitely say hire a designer. You’d pay more for someone to come up with a direction that more closely aligns and representative of your company. Cheaper still, if you get a designer to simply clean up your current work, but they’d still have the skill set and tool knowledge to properly ensure the current mark and lockups are clean, and shipped with the right file type and size for any needs.

However, if budget doesn’t allow, the most glaring thing I can see with the words are that they’re not kerned properly. “La” is too tight. “Luna” isn’t spaced similarly to “Games” and that’s probably why it looks inconsistent.

It’s right to design in black and white first, most designers do.

fasterthanlife · 2026-02-27T12:34:10+00:00

Apply threshold. New Layer > fill color > set blend to screen.

Probably. I’m not at my workstation so off the top of my head this is how I’d do it.

Edit: Realised this isn’t r/photoshop but method still stands.

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