Art school is a magical place. It is a land where there are no bad ideas — just maybe better executions of them. Design classes weren’t much different from the painting and drawing classes I was used to. We would spend weeks on a single project, slowly tweaking it to perfection. If we dared to do something crazy, our professors encouraged us, “Yes! Do that! Be different! Nothing is too abstract! No, stop that! We never use Papyrus or Comic Sans!” I graduated almost two years ago with a pretty decent portfolio full of student projects that were created almost exclusively to showcase my own interests and tastes. After a couple months of job searching, I was lucky enough to land a job at Vérité, where my real education could begin.

Now that I’ve been working in the real world with real clients for a while, I’ve come to realize a couple of pretty important things that could never have been taught in school:

Real world problems. In design school, you are generally designing for the professor. Your work is about solving fake problems and most of the time your goal is to just “make it look nice”. In the real world, you are designing for a real client. This client is spending time and money on you so that you can solve their real problems, problems like, “How can I best convey this information? How will I keep people on my site? What is the best way to get people interested in my product?” Here at Vérité, we have developed an awesome process to help us discover our clients’ needs and provide them with great solutions.

Don’t be married to your work. It’s easy to get attached to your work; you spend time, energy, and even emotions trying to create something awesome. Sometimes, you’ll take your very precious project into a meeting only to get told, “Sorry, this isn’t working.” In school I was told to not get married to my work, but it wasn’t until I started doing real projects that I fully understood what that meant. Sometimes your favorite idea isn’t what is right for the project. It is important to be able to take a step back, breathe, and try again with a fresh perspective. In the end, this will produce the kind of results that both you and the client can be proud of.

Who are you really working for? Ultimately, you need to remember who you are really working for. When it really comes down to it, you are working for the client. It is up to you to provide the best possible product and give them the best possible experience. It is important to remember that sometimes what the client is asking for, and what they actually need are two different things. It is your job, as a designer, to be able to walk them back through the problem they are trying to solve and find a better way to accomplish their goals. It helps to be adaptable, understanding, and kind during this process, and it never hurts to go that extra mile.

These, of course, are just a few of the lessons I’ve learned since beginning my education at Vérité, and with such a solid team of people to work with, the learning never really ends.