So… you’ve taken the leap into the beautiful, chaotic, over-caffeinated world of Bachelor of Design (B.Des). Congratulations, your life now officially runs on deadlines, critiques, and colour palettes.
No, really—your everyday conversations will soon include terms like kerning, vector paths, and “this shade of blue looks sad.” Welcome aboard!
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
Now let’s walk through what college life really feels like when you’re a B.Des student in India.
🎒 Year 1: “I Thought We’d Just Be Drawing”
Let’s bust the myth right away—B.Des is not just about sketching pretty things or “making logos.”
- Day 1: You walk in with a pencil box. Day 10: You’re carrying model-making tools, A3 sheets, and mild regret.
- Classes? Think design theory, history of art, material exploration, and surprisingly—math.
- Group projects become art exhibitions, and critiques feel like a courtroom trial.
Also, you quickly learn the difference between “feedback” and “public humiliation via faculty.”
🪡 Year 2: When Deadlines Start Breathing Down Your Neck
This is the year things heat up. Conceptual thinking, intense assignments, and sleepless nights all come together like a perfectly chaotic symphony.
- Software bootcamp: You’re toggling between Photoshop, Illustrator, and sleep like a seasoned pro.
- Jury day: You dress like you’re attending a UN summit, but inside—you’re praying your printouts don’t betray you.
- Sleep? A beautiful concept you occasionally remember between 4AM renderings.
Your phone gallery is full of work-in-progress screenshots, reference images, and random door handles you clicked for “inspiration.”
✂️ Year 3: Aesthetics and Existential Crises
Now comes the phase where you start finding “deep meaning” in chairs and start calling packaging “storytelling.”
- Fonts are now your friends, and you’ve become a colour psychologist.
- Your room is half art studio, half disaster zone.
- Friends from other courses ask, “You just made a poster? That’s it?” And you smile. And walk away. Slowly.
You’re also now legally allowed (not really) to start every sentence with “As a designer…”
📦 Year 4: Internships, Portfolios, and Pure Panic
The final year is when your assignments slowly turn into case studies. Every presentation is a potential portfolio piece.
- Internships teach you more about office coffee than CorelDRAW.
- Personal branding is real—you start designing your own CV, your own website, maybe even your own future.
- You have more layers in your Photoshop file than actual layers of sleep.
And yet, when you finally hold that finished prototype or see your design on print—there’s magic in the madness.
🎭 Beyond the Classroom: The Real Design Education
B.Des college life isn’t just about academics. It’s about learning to observe. You begin to see ideas in street posters, fabric textures, old billboards, and even in chai tapris.
- You attend design fests, sleep under studio tables, and get into heated arguments over Helvetica.
- You stop seeing things as “good” or “bad”—they’re just “visually unbalanced.”
- Life becomes a series of moodboards—every café, movie, or metro ride adds to your mental Pinterest board.
✅ The Final Draft
Doing a B.Des isn’t just a course—it’s a lifestyle.
It’s long nights, creative fights, software crashes, and that one pen you guard with your life. But it’s also about discovering your voice, your visual language, and a career where your ideas can actually shape the world.
So if someone ever says, “Arre, you just colour for a living?”—just smile.
Then hand them your final semester prototype. With dimensions. And 3D views.
