Excerpts from an Expert

Several very lucky students, faculty and community professionals took advantage of a rare opportunity on Friday, October 15. In celebration of Homecoming at PSU, Brendan Murphy was on campus to receive an Outstanding Alumni award.

He presented several case studies on Brand Management, the development process that goes into restructuring a brand and some of the steps in implementing this process. He also emphasized the importance of our role as communicators. Regardless of the output we are communicating a message. Writing is extremely important in our profession, and he would not be a VP without his writing skills. One other element of his presentation I focused on is that when developing an icon/logo for a company they sometimes go through thousands of revisions before landing on "the one." Keep this in mind the next time you work on thumbnails.

I had the privilege to ask him a few questions throughout the day and he was generous enough to expand on his responses to me in an email.

Technology changes and rapidly.
While investment in technology and computer programs is critical to educational infrastructure, this should not be confused with the education of our students. We must constantly ask ourselves what are we preparing our students for? The shift from paper to screen is still in its infancy. However the fundamentals of good communication are constant.

The Technology Center.
The success of the technology center from a student and university perspective will be its ability to connect with all schools in the university, to nurture and if necessary force collaboration. This is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Internships
This is always difficult and incredibly competitive.
Frankly, we are unlikely to compete with the pure design schools for "design" internships.
However, we can expose broaden students perspectives through tours and with guest lecturers.

Finally…
One question that we must keep returning to is What makes us different?
It may be that we in fact want to be competitive and not different.
However its critical that we define who we are. This will help us define and refine the curriculum.