Courses
Link to: Foundation and General Visual Arts courses
Explores how graphic representation can enhance or transform the meaning of a subject. Students will investigate observed and abstract subject matter; develop a visual vocabulary of mark, gesture, and spatial organization; examine the impact of these on figure and field for storytelling; and use drawing as a method of research and invention to control the conceptual content of an image.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: VIS1060
Students become familiar with hot-type technology and relief printing, together with their contemporary aesthetic possibilities in both the applied and fine arts. Hands-on experience with handset, moveable type is provided, and traditional and experimental techniques are explored. No previous typographic experience is required.
Credits: 3
Explores how images are made, selected, manipulated, sequenced, and distributed. Students experiment with photography, collage, illustration, scanning, digital imaging, and type as image while developing skills in resolution and reproduction. Projects introduce art directorial and editorial thinking, image research, archives, and strategies for creating and curating visual meaning.
Credits: 3
Introduces interactive thinking through time, sequence, rhythm, narrative, and play. Students explore animation, moving image, digital and physical interaction, and experimental production methods. Projects develop algorithmic and narrative thinking while asking how graphic design changes through movement, participation, duration, and different forms of distribution.
Credits: 3
Explores making as a central component of graphic design. Students work with paper, binding, printing, color, and diverse materials while developing skills with hand tools and fabrication technologies. Projects introduce processes such as risograph, letterpress, embroidery, laser cutting, and dye sublimation, emphasizing experimentation, craft, execution, and thoughtful material choices.
Credits: 3
Explores typography as language, form, technology, and material. Students develop skills in typesetting, hierarchy, pairing, sourcing, and expressive typography across print, screen, motion, and space. Projects examine the history and changing technologies of type while encouraging experimentation with how typography communicates, moves, organizes information, and constructs meaning.
Credits: 3
As a counterpart to Word and Image I, Visual Storytelling delivers some related investigation in sign and symbol; but, as a continuation of Drawing as Narrative Process, this course begins focused training in illustration-specific concepts and considerations such as mise en scène, i.e. framing and staging and their relationship to storytelling. Investigates narrative and sequential structures as well as analog and digital media/processes.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: VIS1060
Directs understanding of conceptual approaches to depiction encountered in Visual Storytelling toward visualization of specific topics (e.g., fashion, medicine, finance, lifestyle) while cultivating individual formal and stylistic approaches to visualization. Students engage notions of stylistic convention, communicative considerations relevant to focused areas of practice, and advanced analog and digital (software-based) drawing techniques.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2700
This course treats drawing as a language of intentional mark-making and perceptual clarity. Students develop expressive perspective, compositional intent, and fluency through deliberate observational practice. Emphasis lies in the thinking hand—drawing as translation rather than replication. Studio-based projects, critiques, and readings—using analog and digital tools—cultivate visual fluency and conceptual confidence in illustration.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: VIS1060
This hands-on intensive bookbinding workshop investigates the relationship between content and book structures. Students follow the development of the book from scrolls to case-bound sewn books from the perspective that the way a book is made structures what it communicates.
Credits: 3
A focused inquiry into the nature of interaction for entertainment, persuasion, recreation, or human enrichment. Discussions and readings include sociology, anthropology, game theory and urgent topics such as developments in artificial intelligence. Students gain an understanding their role as creator, participant, viewer, and user. Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express and Python are introduced as the technological substrate for their investigative work.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: (DES2460 And DES3510 ) And DES3200
Builds on the principles and skills of time-based and interactive design introduced in DES 2460. Technique, theory, and practice are further explored through projects using time, on-screen spatiality, transition, kinetic typography, narrative, and sound. Projects address linear and nonlinear environments such as film and television titling, DVD menus, web splash pages, and graphics for mobile devices.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2460
Advances typography through complex projects across media, audiences, and contexts. Students develop sophisticated approaches to hierarchy, grids, sequencing, scale, and typographic systems. Projects connect historical research with contemporary practice and examine how typography operates within publications, identities, environments, screens, and other forms of public communication.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2600 And DES2460
Design issues are world issues. Areas of study include architecture, fashion, urban planning, industrial design, visual, and social media. Issues range from historical to contemporary and from individual to societal concerns, both domestic and global. Curated documentaries followed by student-driven discussions and faculty presentations fill the first dozen weeks. The course culminates with student presentations on design issues of interest.
Credits: 3
A combined lecture/studio course that examines ethical and social issues in contemporary artistic production and design. The goal is to develop active research about urgent issues as ecology, body politics and gender, race and urban justice, and human rights, with respect to new futures. Projects incorporate art installations, visualizations, websites, performances, and public campaigns by focusing on creative public engagement.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: NME2100 Or (DES2600 And DES2460 )
Focuses on print communication, primarily graphic design, in the Western world from the late 19th century to the present. A brief summary of important historical precedents launches a chronological series of lectures on significant movements and individuals and the economic, political, and technological developments that have influenced modern and contemporary print communication.
Credits: 4
Students are introduced to the practices of lettering and designing type. Techniques taught include emerging technologies like variable type, and perennial, historically rooted skills such as calligraphy. Participants learn critical decision-making skills and sensitivities inherent to lettering and developing typefaces for print and screen. Topics include legibility, critical theory, systems, and information design. Materials include pen and ink.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES3200
Emphasizes the development and evaluation of word and image through advanced studies and pragmatic applications. Development of an identity system, applied printed and electronic matter, issues of imagery, relationship to audience, ethics, information theory, and research methods are explored. Students are encouraged to explore the balance between individualized approaches, vision, and appropriateness. Required for graphic design majors.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2460 And DES2600
Prepares students to build sustainable and engaged lives in design. Students develop portfolios, presentation skills, professional identities, and strategies for internships and opportunities. The course addresses collaboration, networking, intellectual property, the creative impact of AI, project management, and professional relationships while helping students articulate their work, interests, values, and future direction.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2600 And DES2460
Expands graphic design into physical space. Students develop packaging, wayfinding, environmental graphics, exhibitions, installations, displays, and spatial identities while considering scale, movement, materials, accessibility, and audience. Projects connect typography and visual systems with architecture and place, using research, planning, mockups, fabrication, and testing to shape how people navigate and experience environments.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2600 And DES2460
Elaborates on the exploration of visual systems in Graphic Design’s Word and Image, focusing solely on the cohesion of form, style, and narrative across multiple images as may be applied to families of communication media: informational icons, a series of covers or product labels, ads in a campaign, sequential literary storytelling, visualization of processes (e.g., instruction manuals), and brand identity programs.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2705
Continues advanced training in illustration-specific concepts and skills around sequentially—first explored in Series + Sequences now extended to time-based expression in both print and digital application: flip books and folding/pop-up media, AR (Augmented Reality) static image manipulations, stop-motion approaches, and extended motion-based animation. Visualization strategies, such as storyboarding, and integration of analog and digital techniques are explored.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2705
Students expand their image-making skills creating coherent and cohesive “worlds”. Expansion involves applied research into several related fields including semiotics, anthropology, mythology, marketing, and media studies. Students will study contemporary and historical examples of media toward the production of their own work. In addition, students will analyze mythological, anthropological, and semiotic forces that could underpin their projects. Deliverables can be 2D, 3D and 4D, and are encouraged to be expansive and interdisciplinary.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES3705
An introduction to the considerations surrounding screen-mediated design spaces. This course includes industry standard research methodologies, as well as an introduction to the conceptual and technical issues involved in the design and production of dynamic documents and environments. This course focuses on how to research, map, visualize, share, and play with self-generated content, while investigating how current technology, software, and hardware can assist (and hinder) the way in which this self-generated content is communicated.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES2460 And DES3510 And DES3200
Students gain technical professional experience by helping provide a safe and well-functioning studio environment for their fellow students. Studio assistants are expected to have advanced standing in their media area and a thorough understanding of current professional practices. Duties include basic maintenance and demonstrations of equipment, independent or group tutorials and workshops, weekly meetings, and other responsibilities assigned by the sponsoring instructional technician. A maximum of 4 credits in DES 3950 (or a combined maximum of 6 credits in VIS 3998 and DES 3950) may be applied toward the BFA.
Credits: 2
Brings senior graphic design students together in a collaborative design studio, combining “real world” professional studio situations with collective examination of the question "what is community?" in a contemporary context. With faculty supervision, students design, art direct, and communicate with clients to complete projects. Students initiate on-campus projects examining class discussion through their collaborative practice. Required for graphic design majors.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: DES3550 And DES3610
Students are encouraged to reconsider what a book is and expand the boundaries of the traditional codex book through workshops in experimental formats, integration of word and image, form and content, sequencing, and physical structure. This may include a variety of projects and the study of video and film structure, historical and contemporary artists’ books, and innovative trade books.
Credits: 3
The ideas and skills inherent in visual arts and literature are combined toward an integrated expression in this interdisciplinary course. Students confront issues of physical format, word and image relationships, sequence, storytelling, semiotics, visual/experimental literature and publishing as an artistic practice. Skills are developed through examining the workings of narrative and story, modes of writing (continuous, automatic, multiple points of view); titling objects; building a visual narrative; graphic and compositional story development; typographic settings of original and found text; and writing and designing for the visual book, performance, and other time-based media. Students choose the medium for their final projects; collaborations are encouraged.
Credits: 3
Information Aesthetics explores how artists and designers engage with data and information in contemporary society. Through research, experimentation, visualization, and visual storytelling, students transform data into meaningful creative work. The course considers how information shapes social, cultural, political, and environmental life while exploring data as a material for artistic and design practice.
Credits: 4
PREREQ: NME1160 Or DES2500 Or NME2100 Or DES2600
Machine Dreams examines machines, automation, algorithms, and technological systems through artistic and cultural production. Moving from historical mechanical systems to contemporary artificial intelligence, the course explores how these technologies shape labor, knowledge, perception, and everyday life. Combining lectures, readings, discussions, and studio production, students critically examine philosophical, ethical, social, and political questions of agency, authorship, power, control, and human-machine relations.
Credits: 4
Juxtaposes art and science as inquiring and creative pursuits. Exchanging knowledge of the materials and processes used in their creative endeavors, students collaborate on three innovative projects that focus on perceived relationships between science and art. Visiting professionals, at work in studios and labs, provide insight into thinking and doing through and across the disciplines of art and science.
Credits: 3
Juxtaposes art and science as inquiring and creative pursuits. Exchanging knowledge of the materials and processes used in their creative endeavors, students collaborate on three innovative projects that focus on perceived relationships between science and art. Visiting professionals, at work in studios and labs, provide insight into thinking and doing through and across the disciplines of art and science.
Credits: 3