The dirty secret they don't want to tell you in art school

Alright kids -- all of you aspiring graphic designers -- it's time for a dose of cold, hard reality, the ugly, dirty truth that nobody in art school speaks of except in hushed tones and Voldemortesque "That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named" euphemistic language.

You really *do* need algebra.

Settle down! Don't panic! The good news is that you don't need all of algebra: none of the matrices or imaginary numbers or polynomials or anything much beyond solving for x really. Algebra 1 is plenty more than you'll need to get you through life as a graphic designer.

But the bad news is that you'll use it mainly to figure out proportions, say, for paper size and whatnot: so you'll need to get cozy with fractions and converting fractions to decimals and decimals to percentages and percentages to measurements you can use. You'll probably also need to know how to convert between units, feet to inches for example.

You'll also need to know how to set up an equation from a question, see? Like a word problem. Allow me to illustrate.

Today, I started printing reply cards for A&R's wedding invitations. However, Neville, being new and wanting to impress, was enlarging the cards, so that (a) they would not fit into the reply envelopes properly -- bad -- and (b) the cards were not being printed entirely, getting cut off at the very end -- extra bad.

Hoping against all hope for a quick, easy fix, I selected the "fit to page" option, but then they printed too small. Oh bother, I sighed, where's that measuring tape?

It turns out that left to his own devices, Neville printed the cards a full eighth-inch too big. I would have to calculate the percentage by which Neville was enlarging the cards, and figure the percentage by which to reduce the print size.

So I drank some coffee, and did some early-morning That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named to figure out at what percentage of the original size I needed to tell Neville to print in order to compensate for his "bigger is better!" philosophy. I'll spare you the gory details (unless you really *want* to know).

I know it's not perfect, and it probably took me way longer than it should have, but I FIGURED IT OUT, and now the cards print at exactly the right size. Hooray! Algebra isn't so useless after all.

And the really good news is that, aside from the basic critical thinking and arithmetic skills required, the most advanced stuff you'll need should be covered in the unit on proportions/ratios, whatever those math people call them. So after that, you can go on doodling in your notebook margins.

Just don't say it was me who told you.