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From Core77's Hack2School: The Ultimate Design Student Guide.

For some of you, the very decision to study design stems from a dislike for, or at least ambivalence toward, writing. And yet, more and more design programs are requiring that students write essays and theses as part of humanities or liberal arts classes--classes that in the end can account for up to a third of a student's credits. Some students are finding, to their surprise, that when it's directed toward something they are really interested in--themselves and their work, for example, or the world seen through a design-tinted lens--they are actually pretty good at writing after all.

Some students are finding, to their surprise, that when it's directed toward something they are really interested in--themselves and their work, for example, or the world seen through a design-tinted lens--they are actually pretty good at writing after all.

The designer who writes is hardly a new phenomenon, however. The tradition extends all the way back to design's emergence as a discipline. In Carma Gorman's anthology of writings about , which spans the years 1851 to 1999, none of the extracts featured are by writers who make their living by writing alone. Some of the pieces are by politicians such as Nixon and Krushchev, or manufacturers such as Henry Ford, but most by far are authored by designers. From Christopher Dresser and William Morris in the late 19th century to Le Corbusier, Eliot Noyes, Dieter Rams and Charles Jencks in the 20th, these designers expressed opinions and theories about their own work and their profession through the medium of writing.

Today, the vehicles for design writing and criticism are more abundant than ever before. As blogs, magazines, academic journals and newspaper column inches devoted to design proliferate, so do the numbers of designers who consider writing a key component of their toolsets. In addition to these publishing venues, there are other initiatives that aim to improve the quality of design writing and enrich design discourse. Among them are the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism, now in its second year and announcing its winners on September 19, and a new clutch of graduate programs in design writing and criticism in the US, Sweden and London.

As designers you can use writing in a multitude of ways. Here are just three:

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See more tips, tricks, and lifehacks for design students at core77.com/hack2school