• if you don’t already have them, buy the following things:
  • big fucking cutting mat
  • olfa L-1 (do not bother with any other pussy olfa blades)
  • x-acto and box of 100 spare blades
  • C-THRU ASE36 metal ruler
  • some leadholders and soft leads
  • silkscreeening stuff (if only to just leave around your house and impress undergrads of the opposite gender)
  • “elements of typographical style”, bringhurst (make sure to carry it in your bag for like a week so it’s all abused-looking)
  • epson 1280 and a continuous ink system
  • bone folder
  • a vanity domain and web hosting


• do not bother buying:
  • a scanner (the school has plenty)
  • “life style”, bruce mau (I mean please)


• never ever ever EVER buy software. there is always some geek in the studio who will priate it and install it for you, if you buy him/her coffee or cigarettes or what have you.


• if you do smoke, smoke kamel red lights, because the box will impress your fellow graphic designers without fail.


• do not say “I’m interested in architecture”. you will sound like an idiot. if you are actually interested in architecture, just quietly take the drafting class they offer at the BEB in the fall and don’t talk about it till after. the class will probably kick your ass all over town, but a) you’ll get your fill of architecture type nonsense and b) drafting, if you don’t already have the skill, is incrediby valuable for typography and type design. be prepared not to sleep every thursday night.


• in fact, be prepared to do 1 all-nighter a week, until the last three weeks of the semester, in which case sleep is pretty much catch as catch can. (it could be worse, you could actually *be* in architecture, in which case forget about sleep in any meaningful way really).


• learn how to bind a fucking book. you will have to make at least one book per class, pretty much. most often these are “process books”. designing a process book is easy: pick your favorite grid from “grid systems” and dump everything from the semester into it. if you bind it nicely, tho, you might be able to bump your final grade up a notch (if you care about such things) cuz the process book will often be the only thing the teacher has to assess you on when grades are due.


• I would admonish you to learn to embellish your speech with intelligent sounding nonsense at this point, but I fear you will learn to do that on your own to a fantastic extent.


• read non-design books and go see movies. if you don’t, you will become some sort of raving academic sycophant, or worse, an AIGA member.


• if you have interesting skills from before you were a grad, don’t talk about them. keep them hidden deep inside and then bust them out for a project w/o telling anyone. trust me, it will be awesome. plus if any of those skills are computer-related, keeping them inside will effectively prevent everyone from considering you the de facto “tech support” go-to person. I hate that shit.


• go to new york all the time. even if you’re some kind of fanatical burrito-eating west coaster, go to new york whenever you can afford it. new york has:
  • awesomer design shit and museums than providence
  • places to buy awesome design shit (talas, kate’s, spoonbills etc)
  • better cheese
  • infinitely better bars and music
  • drugs


• … the apex of the new york thing will happen at some point during your first semester, when you realize everyone in your class is dating someone who lives in brooklyn, and you will have a strange moment some hungover sunday morning when you are walking down the street in green point looking for eggs and you see all your fucking classmates doing the same thing.


• conversely, don’t bother with boston. boston is for dorks. trust me.


• get a good-looking winter coat. providence can get stupidly cold.


• if you have a choice between doing something explicitly “digital” (code, flash, web shit etc) and something “analog” (bookbinding, printmaking, etc) I would say go analog. you can learn flash any fucking time you want, with just a laptop and google, but how often are you going to run across a letterpress studio with a polymer-plate machine?? I mean, who the fuck do you think you are, anyway???


• one thing about crits is: at almost every crit there is a winner and a loser. if you don’t like competition and you think we should all just get along and collaborate and all that, well hey. but the truth is that there is almost always someone who is way out front of everyone else in the crit, be it in terms of content, concept, execution, whatever. it’s not always fair. some people “win” by just producing way more than anyone else and not editing their shit down. everyone else in the class, besides the “winner”, will be at more or less the same level, except the “loser”. this person maybe didn’t understand the project, or they technically fucked up their work somehow, or maybe they’re just an imbecile.
  
  the arc of most classes has this same pattern, typically with the person who “wins” the most crits “winning” the class. it seems to be like RISD de rigeur to give one person an A, the rest B’s, and one person a C or F in like every class. I don’t know if all the teachers got together and decided this one day, or if the situation just happened to converge on that pattern, but there it is.
  
  if you know in your heart that you are a good designer, you won’t care about “winning” or “losing”, but it can be quite fun and stimulating to engage in hearty interclass competition, and it makes you think about your work in a different way. you’re all still friends at the end of the day, and you all still go for beers at the end of the week… “losers” get gossiped about, and “winners” get secretly lauded, but that’s the extent of things really.

useful s. i can feel the truth behind each word.

also, fi$h, how the f are you?!

yer pal,
jonathan

I’m good! yessir. all types of good shit. and yeah it’s all true, most certainly. how the fuck are you then??