A Real World Experience: Teacher Jennifer Hair’s Digital Design Project Management class teaches students how to find design jobs outside of school

Thirteen students plug into desktops with their Adobe products open, putting together potential logos for the school’s coffee shop. 

Jennifer Hair has been the digital design teacher at East for six years. She started teaching the higher level Digital Design Project Management classes right when she got the job. For Hair this class isn’t just design, it’s about learning how to manage clients and go out in the real world and talk to clients and deal with their needs.

“It promotes your external communication skills, you need to be professional and polite and timely when you’re not talking to your best friend beside you,” Hair said. So we have a client facing communication and then we have internal communication.” 

Hair first plans to take field trips to three different design firms. The first will be to Design Farm — an architecture and interior design creative agency founded by Brad Black.

Going on these field trips will make an easy way for Hair to be able to show the students what doing design in the real world is like and how you have to act.

The class has recently become an official club, to allow for even more creative freedom and time with the projects they create. They’re currently brainstorming how to get donations, which will allow them to purchase new programs and go on more field trips to design firms to get the students out into the real world. 

This years’ class is composed of 13 students — a normal amount considering the difficulty of the class, Hair said. Their projects range from varsity banners to senior night programs, according to junior and Digital Design student Bridget Connelly.

“A senior night program normally takes upwards of 10 to 15 hours just for a draft before getting edits and small details fixed,” Connelly said.

They also have to learn to problem solve while using new programs and come up with completely new designs constantly. 

The students are also diversifying from their typical InDesign and Photoshop programs. Currently, they are making video board animations to be shown at all of the district stadiums during football games. 

“It’s a very relaxed class. There aren’t super strict deadlines, but I still get to be creative and work on projects,” junior Emma Kuhlman said.

After being assigned a project from Hair, students contact their clients and determine what they would like to have made. 

The students then find out exactly what the client’s vision is, hoping to create a product as close to that as they can. They will send their drafts to the clients, receive feedback and tweak the designs until it meets the customers expectations. 

Once the client decides which option that they like the most, the students complete any minor changes that are needed for the design. 

Their most recent project is with Belinder Elementary School, designing a new approach to being a leader with the nationwide program “Leader in Me.” 

A team of three students are creating posters to go up all around Belinder to remind the students what it means to be a leader both in and out of school. According to Connelly, the project will take upwards of seven months to completely finish due to the amount of time it takes to have all of the posters made and for the school to decide which ones they like the most.