Why Design School Isn't the Only Path Anymore
Gen Z already knows this. This is for everyone who's catching up.
A Master of Design Arts
I was reading an article on Substack the other day, The Gen Z MBA, and it really resonated with me. The argument was simple: real-world experience is the real test of any education, and perhaps more valuable than spending years in the classroom.
I experienced this firsthand many times. After my junior year of college, we were required to complete a summer internship at a design studio or firm. I thought I was ready. I excelled in my program, was a teacher’s pet, and earned top marks in my class. But the moment I was pulled out of the safe, theoretical environment of school and put in front of an actual art director with an actual brief, I felt completely unprepared.
That first week, she handed me a brief for a T-shirt design. I spent a full day on it and came back with a set of hand-drawn sketches, painstakingly refined with ink and paint, the way I’d been taught to begin every design project. She looked them over and said, “Those look great... but why didn’t you start on the computer?”
I felt silly. I was following my teaching. But I learned something in that moment that no grade had ever taught me: there was a real gap between what was being taught in school—by people who had grown up in the physical world of hand-drawn typography and composite photo collages—and the pace at which a working studio actually operates. Design thinking may be timeless, but the process continues to shift, and I needed to keep up. Nothing closes that gap faster than real feedback instead of a letter grade.
While I’m endlessly thankful for that design education (I still keep in contact with a few favorite professors), that internship was the beginning of a long education that school never gave me. Since then, I’ve worked across pretty much every corner of the industry—in-house, freelance, studio, agency, and now running my own studio, STUDIO ANDOR. Each context taught me something different about how design actually works in the world, and I’m genuinely excited to start sharing it all.
Here’s the thing: we live in a moment absolutely saturated with information. TikTok channels, YouTube shorts, courses, webinars, and your favorite flavor of GPT. The knowledge is technically all out there. But I’ve found that more access doesn’t mean more clarity (anyone else get analysis paralysis?). Sometimes it just means more noise. And there’s nothing like the trusted voice of a friend and colleague when you’re trying to learn something new.
So I’m pulling back the curtain on my studio practice: my design thinking, the frameworks I’ve built over years of working, and the hard lessons from school that only made sense once I was outside of it. Instead of going back to school, you can save your money and your study time with design teaching sent straight to your inbox.
I’m calling it the MDA. A Master of Design Arts. Cheeky, right?
Who This Is For
Designers who are just starting out.
Designers who have been at it for years and still feel like they’re figuring it out.
People who work adjacent to design (marketers, architects, stylists, brand founders) who have started to realize that the way they think about visual problems is, in fact, design thinking. You’re all welcome here.
While this will be very design-centered, I’ve learned that design thinking isn’t discipline-specific. The way a trained designer thinks about color applies just as naturally to fashion as it does to social media strategy, interior design, marketing, architecture, and city planning. The frameworks are portable. The lens transfers. Once you learn to see the way a designer sees, you can’t unsee it, and it becomes useful everywhere.
What the MDA Actually Looks Like
One to two posts a week, varying in depth and focus. Think of it as a real curriculum that covers the things design school glossed over or skipped entirely: finding your design identity, dealing with difficult clients, building a moodboard that actually does its job, running a design audit, and killing your ego while keeping your sanity. The stuff that matters when real money and real relationships are on the line.
The posts are free, but the paid tier offers a deeper look: a more detailed view of my actual process, with real-world examples pulled directly from client work and studio practice.
The Part I’m Most Excited About
Beyond the posts, I want to build something with a little more life to it. Enter: The Collective.
Using Substack chat, this will be a space where we work through exercises together, open up discussion questions, and give real-time feedback on actual projects. This will be genuinely collaborative, built on the idea that I’ll learn as much from you as you will from me. Think of it as the studio critique you always wished you’d had: honest, specific, and without the grade attached.
More details on that soon.
Follow along. The first class starts soon.
