Brian Collins tells professional creatives: There’s no such thing as “time to give back”

Brian Collins is the co-founder of prolific strategy and design agency COLLINS, the top-ranking design agency at the 2021 D&AD Awards. Collins has supported aspiring creatives throughout his career, both through numerous lecturing posts as well as through apprenticeship programmes at his own agency.

As the first D&AD President from Education, Rebecca Wright has invited voices from across the industry to explore learning. In response, Collins has penned a message to professional creatives: that “giving back” through teaching and mentoring is not something to be left until the “end” of a career but benefits everyone – creatives and aspiring creatives – when it’s built into your practice throughout your creative career.

A few years ago I was approached by an accomplished advertising Creative Director whose career was winding down.

“I’m looking to retire from all of this in a few years,” he said. “It will be time to move into teaching. I will finally be able to give back.”

“May I ask why you didn't become a teacher before? Why didn't you start 'giving back' years before?”

"I didn't have the time,” he said.

"Really? Somehow Milton Glaser and Paul Rand had the time. And Paula Scher and Gail Anderson find the time. They all taught for years. Decades.”

"Well, work kept me busy,” he explained.

“You don't think work kept them busy?”

“Well, I guess they could afford to take the time,” he said, desperate for an out, though not about to get one.

“No,” I told him. “They couldn't afford the time. They couldn’t afford not to teach. Teaching was part of their calling, their work. Sure, they could’ve gone home after a long day at the office, or met up with friends for dinner, or made a lot more money than any adjunct professor.”

“They made the time,” I explained. “I made the time myself because it’s important to me. And it’s important to our crew at COLLINS, too. We teach. Some of us are in our 20s. Some in our 40s. We have families. We have other responsibilities.”

I started teaching at 35 at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. I’ve been on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York City since 2001. But I teach – we all teach – not to “give back,” but because these students need us. Right now. And teaching makes us better designers, too.

Good students are like good clients. They have an interest in design, but don’t necessarily understand much about it. Teaching design forces you to think and talk about it in a very deep and specific way. Sure, teaching can be informed by a long career. But the urgency and struggles of the day-to-day make you a better teacher. Students see what it is to be a designer.

My friend the Creative Director was disappointed, if not shocked. How could I not be effusive about his “deep knowledge” or the "great, real-world" lectures he would one day give to students who would be enthralled by his “many, many years of experience?”

For him, teaching was some sort of hazy, magical undertaking. He had visions of recounting war stories, showing his best work and imparting his “hard-won wisdom” to a captive roomful of hypnotised, adoring twenty-year-olds.

No, that’s not how it works.

If you are a professional teaching a weekly class or giving an occasional lecture on top of everything else you must do, bravo. We need you.

Are you a full-time design professor? God bless you. We stand on your shoulders. All of us.

But if you are a senior creative person with retirement in view and seeking my advice about how to start your new teaching career down the road – here it is: Don't.

Our students do not need you. They needed you to “give back” while you were still deep in the trenches. To be brutally honest, that’s when you needed them, too.

Teaching isn’t easy. It takes years to get good. Longer to get really good. The first hurdle – and it’s a big one –is simply learning how to speak to students: These are people in their teens and twenties who don’t work for you, nor are they your kids. They come from all different backgrounds and are interested in design for all kinds of reasons. It is up to you to figure out how to teach them what they need to know. It is up to you to learn how to listen to what they are telling you.

I have a career because one young designer dedicated her career to teaching in her early twenties. Elizabeth Resnick, my professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, never waited to give back. She made a life of it.

If you wait until you retire, if you wait for some convenient future moment to “give back,” it will be too late.

Instead, start now.

Take all those “many, many years of experience” and all that “deep knowledge” and put them to good use: Volunteer your services to non-profits working hard to make our world a better place. Make a difference.

And yes, please come visit our classes and tell our students about your work past, present and future. You can still “give back.”

But leave the teaching to us.

Read D&AD President Rebecca Wright’s thoughts on why learning is an important part of all professional creatives’ practice, well into their careers here.

Join Rebecca Wright in conversation live on the topic of learning in the live D&AD series Still Learning Live here, where you can watch back interviews with past guests, including Lydia Pang.