I would suggest that the phenomenon can be explained for what passes for "knowledge" in the age of Google. It appears that many young people, growing up in a webcentric world, confuse instant access to information with knowledge. This is simply not so: knowledge is hard-won and it is cumulative, Furthermore, knowledge is dependent on--and, paradoxically, also increased by--pattern recognition. If the answers are simply handed to you on a platter, the path that leads to them is never seen.

Plus, since youngster of a certain age always know more than their elders, it's difficult to convince them that "the old ways" have any value. Of course, that's just my curmudgeonly opinion; some young whippersnapper will probably set me straight...

I've noticed this as well. Being one of the 24+ year-old students, I've seen classmates with the same confused and frustrated look with regards to grids. I think oldnick is right with his comment regarding the difference between "knowledge & information". The younger students, from my experience, have a hard time understanding the idea of applying steps as a means to an end and not as the end result.

Maybe it's because they think it is more work without any immediate benefit (it takes a little more time to set up a grid), time that could be spent throwing information onto the page and moving on to solving the next problem.

It seems that lately (I've discussed this with other professors and they seem to agree), younger students seem to lack problem-solving skills; almost as if the end goal of any design or academic problem could be solved through collecting and retaining information—not through critical thinking or experimentation.

My experience has been that a surprising number of designers (of all ages) don't use style sheets and sometimes not even master pages. At least not on shorter documents.

I'm not sure if it's laziness, or lack of proper training, or feeling that these things impose too much rigidity to the design, or a feeling that setting these things up takes more time than they save.

I'm not sure why your younger students are having more problems, but you might want to set up some assignments in a way that using style sheets actually saves them time. For example, a multi-page project in which their assignment calls for them to to set it 2 different ways, and they get a graphic demonstration that using style sheets makes that kind of change a snap.

From my brief experience in teaching type, I can say that most new students lack the passion for design we grow-ups have. And they're used to getting things pretty fast, which might play against them (I guess the same could be said for us older designer compared to our predecessors?)

James might have a great idea by the way: Give them some text and tell them to set it up in a multi-page document (don't mention grids yet). Then, give them another text and tell them to set it up on a grid (maybe provided by you? Or to use one from some examples you provide?). If they compare the results and time spent on both, the right answer should pop right up.

Or maybe they'll like the non-grid one better and the whole thing backfires…

Good luck!

> James might have a great idea...
> tell them to set it up on a grid

Thanks but I was actually referring to style sheets as a timesaver, not grids.

Grids are certainly a good thing, and I guess they can save time in some situations, but I think of style sheets and master pages as practical tools which 1) insure consistency and 2) make it faster and easier to make changes. And I think that many people regard #2 as their main motivation for using them.

If you create a long document and then decide to make changes to the margins, fonts, type color, point sizes, or whatever, it might take quite a while to go through the document and change each instance manually, but if you've used style sheets and master pages you can make those global changes in seconds.

I agree with JamesM. Way back in the college days when I would do a lot of prepress work for folks I saw a LOT of disorganized files. QuarkXPress files linking to non-existent images. No Style Sheets. PDFs generated with the wrong settings. Etc.

Early jobs as a web designer in large agencies gave me plenty of experience with PSD files where designers couldn't be bothered with grouping layers, or deleting unneeded ones. Nothing like trying to figure out a 99 layer PSD file.

As such, my theory is that the older students just have more experience with whatever they've done and value the organizational part of what they are doing as much as the creative side.

The older that craftsman gets, the more particular they are about how their tool box is kept organized.

> Nothing like trying to figure out a 99 layer PSD file.

Years ago a design manager told me that he felt some junior designers deliberately created complex files as job insurance. They figured that if no one else at the office could figure out how they constructed the file, then they couldn't be fired until the end of the project. He told me that software programmers have been known to use a similar strategy as job insurance.

His theory was interesting, but personally I feel that Aluminum is correct that it's mostly just lack of experience.

Could be a couple of things.

• People's brains function differently at different ages. They process and organize information differently.

• Life stages: when you're 13-22, all you have is time. Us adults have busy lives that need more efficiency. 24+, you've probably have held a real job and needed to become more productive. Before that, who cares if you have to recreate a template 99 times? Necessity is the mother of invention.

Try creating a need for them to use master pages, by giving them an overwhelming volume of work. Then you'll see who works smart over who works hard.

To that last point, I think 95% of people are fed the line that hard work is everything. Spending a prodigious amount of hours at something means you've done good at it. Which isn't really the truth. Ultimately, you must produce something worth while.