Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

Ok….I admit the title is a little misleading. Maybe it should have read “almost everything I learned in design school was wrong” but it does not have nearly the staying power. Anyway, I went on a Bruce Nussbaum reading frenzy yesterday and found out that design education in America really could improve.

First the good stuff about my design education. As I have stated before here, I am so proud to have received a BFA and how it helped me to be innovative to adjust my career path. I do not think a typical business education would have done the same for me but that is just me. I needed a different type of education to learn to adapt and to process different orientations.  Plus it was really cool to make pretty pictures and exercise my right brain muscle to the fullest.

Now the bad stuff that I believe needs improvement. As Nussbaum correctly points out, design is everywhere not just the touch points they teach you in school. Contrary to what I was taught, design is a journey not an finishline. We spent an entire semester learning how to make Rubylths, amberliths and ink drawings. A complete waste of time! Think about how much more effective it would have been for us to learn design as an experience instead of a process to an end.

All the blame cannot be thrown on SCAD as they did the best they could in the time alloted. I do think that they could have made the education a little more adaptable to current trends though. For example, I graduated in 2001 and attended most of my classes during the middle of the web boom and they still emphasized print design as a primary focus.

What if we did not spend time on a specific aspect of design and learned about how people experience design around them before stepping into techniques. Then gradually built up those techniques based on design as a journey from which people experience their lives. Almost a reverse concept of what was taught to us in school but definitely something that would have shaped a new type of designer.

A few years ago, I started working at Nielsen Buzzmetrics which eventually became Nielsen Online. I remember the first days there being so full of enthusiasm and pride in working for such a cool innovative company. One of the coolest things, I remember about Buzz back then was BlogPulse the free blog indexing tool that was built a few years prior.

It has so many cool innovative tools to help in trending everything from popular blogs to topics of conversation amongst those blogs. I would look at BlogPulse and immediately know the days news and how folks felt about that news. In a sense, it was and still is a quick glance at the collective ideas of the online world. Its really quite fascinating and I was proud to be a part of the team.

As things go, I moved on from Nielsen to Microsoft and BlogPulse faded into the back of my mind only to be visited rarely. So you can imagine my excitement when I read via Twitter that BlogPulse had relaunched. My mind immediately wondered what cool new tools would be in store for BlogPulse in this incarnation. Would it remain the innovative tool that it was? Would I start visiting more frequently to use these tools in new and wonderful ways?

More than 3 years in the making BlogPulse has a new skin and its much cleaner design than the old one. I appreciate the efforts that were put into making it much easier to find and sort through the mountains of information that are digested daily through BlogPulse. The design is really nice. One thing about the design that I found peculiar was the lack of obvious linking back to Nielsen the parent company of the tool other than a small link in the footer of the page. I see the big logo in the upper right but its not clickable as a link. If this was to avoid obvious marketing by Nielsen than I definitely applaud it.

The other area that I found particularly strange was that other than calling out a few trends in  a new upper left hand box the site offers no particular innovations. Essentially its a new skin on an old site that took a number of years to complete. I would have really enjoyed seeing Nielsen bring some new tools to the site or a blog that explained the changes and brought a personal spin to it. In a world, of AJAX and Javascript that would have enhanced trending tools Nielsen really could have pushed this to the next level. Instead its really the same BlogPulse with new clothes.

In any event, cheers to Nielsen for modernizing the design and helping me to remember BlogPulse and its cool tools. Hopefully in the next incarnation we will see some more innovations but for now it looks like we will have to be satisfied with a new look.

If you are a regular reader to this blog (thanks Mom) you may have noticed the new tab in the menu bar. Its titled “Portfolio”  and contains  a selected assortment of some of my design work. Most of it was completed over 5 years ago when I worked in advertising as an art director.

It probably should have been put up quite a long time ago but as the title to this entry says “better late than never.” In any event, I will be working on the tab from time to time adding stuff and changing the format a  bit so check it out when you are here and get your dose of Stemato’s creativity!