Product Description

An invaluable resource for prospective students searching for the right school: America's Best Architecture & Design Schools. This eighth annual survey is the definitive guide to design education and includes invaluable information on Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design, and Industrial Design programs across the nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #935600 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Released on: 2006-11-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 103 pages

Review
"We applaud the continued efforts of DesignIntelligence to establish benchmarks and measure trends regarding the effectiveness of architectural education." --Archvoices

Customer Reviews

Pricey but good starting point
The folks at Design Intelligence have done a good job presenting a clean and well-presented book outlining some design professons. Design Intelligence and this annual 'overview' get slammed a lot for being severely overpriced and light -- which I can see.

However, information comes at a price when you really want it. And as a post college grad with some years of non design-work experience, it was quite useful to me as a starting point for exploring further education and a career change. And I would rather have a bound book with all this information collected for me than have to piece it together over several websites.

In addition to essays by actual students and designers (the essays were somewhat helpful, I only skimmed over them) and school rankings (enlightening for me, I had no idea University of Cincinatti had such good design programs and I would not have looked into the Art Center College of Design otherwise) the most helpful part for me were teh SALARY GRAPHS and also the professional surveys given to employers rating new grads/hires.

The book outlines new challenges and boons to respective design fields (tighter immigration controls and rising demand = greater opportunities and better training for American students in _____ field) and really opened my eyes to HOW LITTLE so many designers with 5 years and less work experience get paid.

My father is an architect and he had always said that the pay was bad but I didn't quite believe how bad until I looked at the figures in this book. It definitely gave me food for thought as I contemplate 5 more years of school for an MA (not gonna happen) to get paid much LESS than I was at my last job with just a BA. The essays by design students was also helpful in that many of them seem to highlight the same thing - finding the best 'fit' with a firm is important but getting a fulfilling design job that pays well is hard and most recent design grads are taken for granted (though again, that's changing in some fields).

Not for design schools
The design school section (which is why I bought the book) is a very meager 8 pages in a very expensive 103 pages. I am sure it is useful for anyone interested in architecture--but not Industrial Design

Useful information, but a high price for what you get
Definitely valuable information for anyone looking at design schools, but over-priced for the quantity of information included. I bought this when I was deciding which graduate Interior Design programs to apply to. Essentially what you are purchasing in this book is the top 10 list. I hoped there would be more included about each of the top programs (like their strengths or how many students they admit each year, competitiveness, any other stats) but this is not the case. So, once you read through the list, you're on your own to research each program you may wish to apply to. Though the information that is included is important to reference at the beginning of your search for schools, this is just a cursory jumping off point and you will need to do much more research.