The best screen designers

I used to enjoy technical drawing and was self taught, investing my own pocket money in a T-square Rosetta Stone and board. It wasn't taught in Grammar School, but I was an enthusiastic carpenter and it was useful for designing furniture. I also loved the construction question at the start of geometry exams for the same reason. The point about this is that it gives you a sense of balance, of representation and also representing three dimensions in two. I have known have been architects, Printing and publishing skills. Back in school we acquired an old cold metal printing machine. You had font trays full of metal or wooden letters that you assembled backwards and stacked with wonderful tightening devices into forms that you laid into the press. With one foot you started to pedal and the rollers swept over the ink plate before coating the letters and withdrawing in time to imprint the paper that you had placed with one hand seconds earlier. As the pattern returned you took the paper out with another hand. A feat that involved considerable co-ordination and meticulous preparation. We also entered printing competitions where you were judged on evenness of type, elimination of white runs in text and such like. All of that gave you a sense of page design. To this day if I am writing marketing literature, I create the design template in Pages and write to fit within the space. A paranoid Rosetta Stone Language attention to the use of styles in word processing. This should be taught from day one in school. No carriage returns to create a line space, no changes of font sizes or colour. All of that should be styles, that way you can change things quickly, other people can use your work without reformatting. There have been times when I have wanted to garrotte colleagues who do not understand how to do this, or worst still understand how but not why! Its not something you should learn later, by that time bad habits have been formed, learn it young and stay paranoid. Object orientation, its never too early to learn the basics of this approach to system design (and it applies to humans as well as computer programs). Key concepts such as inheritance and polymorphism are easy to understand and will influence the way that people think, and the expectations they have of new tools and technologies. Its not just about re-use, its about designing at the right level of granularity whether you are thinking of organisations or software. It also helps people understand a modern social computing environment in which tools and data from multiple sources integrate in novel and different ways. Thinking in terms of applications leads to linear thinking, lack of adaptability and resilience.If anyone wants to Rosetta Stone American English add to that feel free. Remember I am talking here about about skills, many of which are not ICT specific but create core capabilities when the brain is plastic and more able to learn, that can be applied to an uncertain future. Too many schools teach current.