The Essential Ingredients of a Graphic Design Program
During the planning of the graphic design program I tried to condense as much as I could from what knowledge I had of a four year North American program to a one year study abroad program. I decided on courses that I thought where essential in the learning process of a design student.
Ingredients #1 (the courses):
Graphic Design: Here students were to learn the principles, elements, language of shape, image and form, history, contemporary practices and how to visually communicate concepts. The second semester was going to be used as a student-developed research project.
This course was very important to me because all these elements were being barely touched on in their current technical course of Digital Imaging. I proposed this course because it was something that I felt students needed to progress further in design practice. It was one way for me to combat the every increasing tendency of computer reliance in all process stages of graphic design projects.
Typography: I wanted the students to learn about typography by covering all aspects from history and language to form, function and materials. I believe having a strong foundation in typography is a necessity to explore one practice. I’ve seen so much horrible use of type in graphic design that the understanding of type and language is just as important as learning about the image if not more. This course was planned to visit some historical presses in Florence giving students a historical foundation to their work in addition to small lectures and exercises exploring typography as communicative language through form.
Digital Tools: When developing the program, I scrapped the course title of “Digital Imaging” and replaced it with “Digital Tools”. I did this because I think for a graphic design programs, the term digital imaging was misleading and has the condition that students of any major could take a Photoshop class and direct it towards their art projects.
The Digital Tools class, is an important part of design today and I don’t see graphic design in practice today without the use of the computer. By my earlier decision of splitting graphic design elements and principles course from technical learning was not because I felt that students did not need the computer, but more so to develop these skills on different deeper levels than a quick overview. This course would be developed over two semesters. Students will be introduced to Photoshop and Illustrator in the first semester through communication design projects. In the second semester, students will be introduced to InDesign, Acrobat and maximizing their work flow techniques.
Web Design: This course was to be integrated in the second semester of study, where students would take a look at design from an interactive level. The purpose of this course was to give students a basic overview of how they may communicate projects through web-based applications.
I felt this was important to the program because most of the other courses where directed to print design and there was a need to introduce students to other design disciplines. Web design and interaction design are growing fields, I recognize this as a designer and see great use of this knowledge in graphic design.
Advertising, web design and publication design were to be electives with a self promotion class being taken in the last semester that was dedicated to the business of design and portfolio building techniques.
Why…