The Tools You Were Born With
How design education changes when you start with people, not software
What It Actually Means to Learn Design
Every semester, someone asks me: Should I learn Photoshop or Illustrator first? My answer never changes: Neither. Use your hands!
Learning design isn’t about memorizing shortcuts. It’s about cultivating perception. You learn to see patterns, tension, imbalance, humor. You learn when to leave space, when to fill it, when to break a rule on purpose. The tools are just amplifiers for those instincts.
I tell my students that design is really a form of translation. You take something internal—a thought, a story, a conviction—and make it visible to someone else. The translation fails when you rush, decorate, or imitate. It succeeds when your decisions are honest.
That’s why I still make my students work with their hands, even the ones terrified of creating on their own. Hand making slows them down long enough to think. Design isn’t decoration; it’s discernment. I use drawing, collage, simple printmaking, even rubbings–students connect with these moments with their innate sense of design, every single time.
Teaching in the Age of Templates
We’re surrounded by “instant design”—apps that hand us prefabricated beauty. But good design still requires the friction of uncertainty. It comes from wrestling with choices, not accepting defaults.
That’s why I teach both the hand and the digital. I want students to know that they don’t have to buy their way into creativity. They just have to start paying attention. And when they do, they find that design is less about what you make and more about how you see.
Design doesn’t start with a tool. It starts with the act of noticing—how text sits in space, how color hums or clashes, how form carries meaning. Once you start noticing, the software simply becomes another language to speak fluently, not a mystery to master.
We live in an age when anyone can learn design. There are YouTube tutorials for everything, template platforms promising instant branding, and AI tools spitting out logos in seconds. And yet, the deeper practice of design—seeing clearly, thinking critically, choosing intentionally—still has to be taught the old-fashioned way: through attention, critique, and making things with your own hands.
The Modern Designer’s Dilemma
A student once told me, “I want to learn design, but I can’t afford the software.” It’s a valid point. The industry standard tools have become toll booths. It is a heartbreaking idea in the first place–students are convinced design lives in the machine, not in them. I have more on that in later essays. For 25 years as a design teacher, I have had to shill for Adobe and its monopoly in design classrooms. I am now teaching tool agnosticism–I have to get students to see the tools are immaterial all the more! With AI in the mix, it is imperative we reveal the humanity and creativity all the more.
Right now, I let students choose their software path: Adobe Creative Cloud or Affinity V2. One is the reigning empire, the other a scrappy challenger offering a six-month professional trial. What matters isn’t which you choose—it’s that you commit, build a process, and learn how to think visually. Once you understand principles like hierarchy, contrast, and rhythm, you can design with anything from Photoshop to a grocery-store marker.
I also hope to erode Adobe’s grip on my industry–I still remember how that company cut off all of my students during COVID. I lost so many students to not being able to access the programs that all of the schools through were essential… And I have worked with as many free or low cost digital tools as I could since. NO ONE GETS LEFT BEHIND THE PAYWALL!
This approach is part of how I teach my my design classes. More broadly, it’s the model I believe all modern design education should follow: flexible, equitable, and idea-driven. The gatekeeping days are done.
Teaching continues to remind me of that truth. Whether I’m guiding students through Affinity or Adobe, I’m really teaching one thing: how to notice. Because once you learn to notice, you can’t unsee—and that’s where every good designer begins.
This reflection is drawn from my upcoming course, “Visual Communication and Graphic Design: An Overview,” offered through NYU’s School of Professional Studies in Spring 2026.