There are conversations that do not simply describe a problem. They expose a system. My conversation with Chris Sanders, founder of Right Aligned Academy, was one of those conversations. What began as a discussion about creative education, community, employability and the future of young designers quickly became something much larger: a diagnosis of a design education system that has drifted too far from practice, too far from students, too far from industry, and perhaps most dangerously, too far from its own original purpose.
Chris speaks from a position that is rare and increasingly necessary. He did not arrive through the polished academic route. He entered design through work, through making, through culture, through music, record sleeves, flyers, posters and football programmes. In other words, he entered design not through theory first, but through life. This matters, because the crisis we discussed is not only about curriculum, software or graduate skills. It is about whether design education still connects to life as it is actually lived.
Right Aligned Academy was born out of rupture. During the pandemic, Chris saw the agency he had built over ten years effectively collapse as clients went into lockdown. What might have remained a private professional disaster became instead a public educational turn. Rather than simply rebuild another client-facing business, he began asking a larger question: how could his experience, and the experience of others, become useful to young creatives who were frightened, isolated, underprepared or excluded from the invisible networks of the design industry?
This origin is important because Right Aligned Academy does not begin with institutional theory. It begins with aftercare. It begins with the recognition that many young creatives leave education not with confidence, but with anxiety. Not with access, but with uncertainty. Not with a clear sense of how to enter the profession, but with a portfolio, debt, and a vague hope that somebody somewhere will give them a chance.
The phrase that stayed with me from the conversation was Chris’s distinction between a gap and a void. For years, we have spoken politely about “the gap” between education and industry. The phrase sounds manageable. A gap can be bridged. A gap can be addressed by a guest lecture, a live brief, an internship, a module update, or a little more employability provision. But Chris is right to suggest that the gap has now become something more severe. It is no longer simply a space between two systems. It has become a void.
The void exists because industry has accelerated while education has slowed down. Agencies have had to adapt to motion, AI, rapid content production, shrinking budgets, demanding clients, compressed timelines and increasingly complex deliverables. Students, meanwhile, may still be moving through systems that take years to approve curriculum changes, years to respond to new practice, and years to recognise that the world outside the classroom has already changed. In the conversation, Chris gives a simple but devastating example: graduates emerging after years of study still not understanding basic distinctions such as RGB and CMYK, while at the same time being expected to survive in a professional world transformed by AI, motion, digital systems and commercial pressure.
This is not a minor technical problem. It is a sign of educational failure. If students leave with large debts, fragile confidence and underdeveloped professional skills, then the issue is not simply that they need to “try harder”. The issue is that the promise made to them has not been properly fulfilled.
Yet one of the strongest aspects of the conversation was that neither of us wanted to blame students. Students are often the last people to blame. They are entering systems already shaped by institutional weakness, commercial pressure, parental overprotection, digital distraction, social anxiety, economic instability and the after-effects of Covid. Many are timid because the world has made them timid. Many are passive because education has trained them to wait for permission. Many are under-skilled because earlier schooling has already removed the cultivation of drawing, making, observation and sustained attention.
It is easy to say that universities need to become more industry-ready. It is harder to ask whether the university model itself is still capable of serving design education properly. Chris’s criticism of higher education is not simply that it is old-fashioned. It is that it has become confused. Institutions that once served local communities, regional cultures and public educational missions have increasingly become property holders, recruitment machines and commercial businesses. They are told to operate like businesses, but often without the clarity, discipline or service logic of a genuinely well-run business.
This produces a strange contradiction. Universities charge large sums of money, but do not always provide the integrated support that such costs should imply. Students are sold aspiration, but not always given formation. They are encouraged to imagine creative futures, but may be left alone to navigate housing, food, debt, anxiety, employability and the shock of professional life. In the conversation I argued that if education is going to behave like a business, it must at least learn to serve like one: clear offer, clear structure, clear responsibility, clear support.
But there is another danger. If design education becomes only industry preparation, then it loses the very thing that makes it education. I agree with Chris that young designers need to understand deadlines, clients, budgets, communication, presentation, process and commercial reality. They need to know that design is not simply “fun” or making nice things. It is work. It is pressure. It is responsibility. But I also argued that students must be given space to imagine what does not yet exist. If the studio simulation becomes only a rehearsal for current industry conditions, then education risks producing obedient workers for exhausted systems.
This is one of the central tensions of the future of design education. Students must be prepared for the world as it is, but not imprisoned by it. They must understand industry, but not worship it. They must learn professional discipline, but not lose imaginative freedom. They must be able to enter a studio, but also be capable of questioning whether the studio itself needs to change.
Chris made a powerful point in response: perhaps the first year of design education should not begin with design at all. Perhaps students should be placed with scientists, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs and people from entirely different fields. This matters because design can become narrow when it only looks at itself. Designers who look only at design often become stylists of existing trends. Designers who look at the world become thinkers, connectors and makers of new possibilities.
This is where our views strongly aligned. The best design education is not a tunnel. It is a widening of perception. It should teach students to see culture, behaviour, material, technology, economy, language, community, power and desire. The designer’s task is not merely to make outputs. It is to understand situations. That understanding cannot come from software alone. It comes from being awake to the world.
Yet we returned again and again to skills. In many Western contexts, students are being told, directly or indirectly, that traditional skills no longer matter. Drawing is treated as optional. Craft is treated as nostalgic. Analogue practice is treated as a decorative supplement to digital production. This is a serious mistake. A student without skills has very little to exchange with the world. They may have opinions, references and intentions, but without cultivated ability, they cannot move ideas into form with force.
This does not mean returning to a romantic past. It means recognising that digital and analogue intelligence must be held together. When computers entered design, many institutions discarded letterpress, print workshops and analogue processes as if they belonged to a dead world. Now, after decades of digital acceleration, many are trying to recover what was lost. AI may intensify this return. The more automated visual production becomes, the more valuable human judgement, touch, material knowledge, drawing, slowness and embodied making will become.
There was a hopeful moment in the conversation when we spoke about younger generations turning away from excessive digital saturation. Young people seeking older phones and disconnecting from social media. Whether this becomes a large cultural shift or a small counter-movement, the signal matters. Too much digital life creates hunger for analogue reality. Too much automation creates hunger for human presence. Too much speed creates hunger for attention.
This is why the future of design education cannot be solved by simply adding AI modules. AI is already changing entry-level roles. It is already absorbing junior tasks. It is already pushing expectations upward. Chris argued that students may need to graduate closer to mid-weight readiness because some of the old junior learning space is disappearing. This is a profound challenge. Historically, graduates were not expected to know everything. They learned by sitting beside more experienced designers. They absorbed craft, judgement and professional rhythm through proximity. If those entry-level spaces disappear, education must either become much more serious or admit that it is sending students into a professional world that no longer has room to train them.
But this also means industry must take responsibility. One of the most important themes in the conversation was mutual responsibility. Education cannot solve this alone. Industry cannot complain endlessly about graduates while offering fewer entry points, less mentoring and less patience. Students cannot expect to be carried passively into professional life. Parents cannot protect adult children from every form of pressure. Institutions cannot continue to sell creative futures while hollowing out the very conditions that make those futures possible.
A serious future for design education requires a new social contract between students, educators, industry, institutions, parents, cities and communities. This is where Right Aligned Academy becomes interesting. It is not merely a content platform. It is beginning to imagine itself as an agile network of resources, events, local hubs, professional insight and community support. Chris speaks about physical and digital spaces, about Manchester, Leeds, London, Berlin, Melbourne and Sydney, about small communities rather than abstract scale. He is not interested in creating five hundred events in five hundred cities for the sake of appearance. He is interested in depth, locality and impact.
This is crucial. The future of creative education may not be one centralised institution claiming universal authority. It may be a network of smaller, agile, place-sensitive, practice-connected communities. These communities can respond faster than universities. They can listen more carefully. They can shape themselves around local needs. They can connect young people with real designers, real stories, real processes and real working conditions.
Chris’s idea of impact is also important. He does not measure it only through reports, metrics or institutional language. He measures it through how people leave the room. Are they more confident? Have they made contacts? Do they want to return? Do they feel less alone? Do they now believe there is a place for them in the creative world? This is not soft. It is fundamental. Education begins when someone feels that learning is possible for them.
The conversation also challenged the way we use history in design education. I argued that students need to understand how we arrived here: the history of art, design, music, architecture and visual culture. Without history, they inherit forms without understanding origins. Chris agreed with the importance of principles, but made an equally important point: reference points must be delivered in ways that students can actually receive. The issue is not whether Paul Rand still matters. The issue is how we connect the enduring principles of process, presentation, judgement and persuasion to the cultural realities of students living in 2026.
This is a subtle but necessary distinction. We should not abandon history. But neither should we weaponise it as nostalgia. The task is translation. The teacher must show why old principles still live inside new forms. The presentation of the NeXT identity to Steve Jobs may still teach us something essential about clarity, confidence and design argument. But students may also need to understand TikTok, algorithms, motion identity, content systems and contemporary brand behaviour. The principle may be old. The delivery must be alive.
A recurring question underneath the whole conversation was this: how do we create hunger? Information is everywhere, but appetite is rare. A student can watch a legendary designer explain the principles of branding and still understand nothing if they have never made anything seriously themselves. Access alone is not education. Availability alone is not learning. The student must have enough experience, struggle and desire to recognise the value of what is being offered.
This is why attainment still matters. Not in the narrow sense of grades, but in the deeper sense of earned readiness. Some spaces should be open to everyone. Others require commitment, discipline and seriousness. Design can be introduced broadly as a way of thinking and living, but professional design demands obsession. It demands repeated making, failure, refinement, critique, attention and care. There can be levels. There can be entry points for the curious and deeper paths for those who are ready to commit.
This may be one of the most important educational ideas in the conversation: not exclusion for elitism, but differentiation for truth. Not everyone needs to become a professional designer. But everyone can benefit from creative intelligence. At the same time, those who want to enter the profession must understand the level of commitment required. Pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Right Aligned Academy and the New Art School absolutely agree about the loss of living connection between education, practice, culture and human formation. The future we discussed is not simply a better university course. It is a different ecology. It includes workshops, talks, studios, events, mentoring, analogue practice, digital fluency, business literacy, community hubs, international networks, local identity, peer learning, professional honesty and space for imagination. It does not separate employability from humanity. It does not separate craft from culture. It does not separate industry from responsibility.
At its deepest level, the conversation was about stewardship. Chris described himself not as someone building a hierarchy, but as a custodian. That word matters. The best educators and cultural builders do not own the future. They hold something long enough to pass it on. They protect the conditions in which others can grow. They create spaces where young people can become more capable, more courageous and more awake.
Design education is now standing at a dangerous threshold. One path leads to further automation, hollowed-out institutions, passive students, exhausted educators, anxious graduates and an industry that complains while consuming its own future. The other path requires more courage. It asks us to rebuild creative education around practice, community, responsibility, imagination and skill.
Chris Sanders is right: the gap has become a void. But a void is also a space waiting to be filled. Not with another empty promise. Not with another institutional slogan. Not with another platform pretending to be a school. But with living communities of practice where young creatives can learn what design really is: not decoration, not software, not content production, but a way of seeing, making, connecting and acting in the world.
That is the work now. Not to repair the old system cosmetically, but to build the conditions for something more humane, more agile, more demanding and more alive.
💛 Love what we do at The New Art School & Design Education Talks podcast? Help keep design education alive!
If you believe in the future of art and design education, please support the independent conversations that help shape it. We need your support to continue. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1969986/support
✨ Join our mailing list: https://sendfox.com/thenewartschool
Explore more: https://linktr.ee/thenewartschool | @newartschool| https://newartschool.education/ | https://heretakis.medium.com/ | https://odysee.com/@thenewartschool:c
The New Art School 