I mentor at a local college. It’s a great way to see how the next generation are being taught to approach advertising and design. I learn a lot about expectations, processes and ideas.

Oh, and I suppose I’m of some help to the students.

Whatever.

Each year, without fail, I see things I don’t like. It could be that students are being given six months to explore a brief when I know one day they will have, well, one day.

This year I got to talking about a design the student had done and I asked why he’d done it, what thought processes had led to it. We discussed it in some detail because I’d got quite a different interpretation of it. Ultimately I asked how the student “sold” it into the tutor.

The answer was that designs weren’t sold in. They were given no rationale.

It made me wonder that if students weren’t required to explain, if they weren’t required to show their working out, then what would encourage them to do any working out to begin with.

And without being able to explain why a design works then what faith could I have in the message it is supposed to convey?

Moving to old man mode, I believe that part of the reason there is any kind of debate about the quality of creative at the moment (a topic being run in The Drum lately) is that very little in the way of rationale and message is actually being demanded.

Perhaps if colleges took up the challenge to be more commercial in their teaching technique then we might see this change at grassroots level. Certainly a more vocational approach to design wouldn’t hurt as students learn to better understand the demands clients will one day put upon them.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

A friend of mine had a leaky tap. Not the sort that threatens flood. Not the sort requiring of a finger in a hole. Just a steady drip drip drip.

The trouble was he was about to go away for the week and, well, that drip wasn’t about to dry up anytime soon.

But plumbers are expensive. Call out charges alone seem prohibitive.

So it’s either a steady drip for a week or a major drain on the salary.

This is what he did.

He calculated the rate of the drip. It was four drips every minute. That didn’t sound like a big deal.

Then he multiplied that by sixty to get the drops per hours. Multiplied again by twenty four for the day rate before doing it again to get the week (that’s another seven for those of you calculating along with him).

This left him with the number of drips that would drop over the week. Got it? 40,320.

Suddenly that seemed like a lot. A lot of drips, a lot of water.

And he was going away. For the week.

Know what he did?

He tried to fix it himself, made it worse and had to call the plumber.

My friend is a programmer. Sometimes he takes the long way around to find a solution but at least he’s thought it through every step of the way and understood why he needed that plumber.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.