Graphic Design, Winter 2020
Graphic Design began with a team-based logo design project intended to introduce students to the design thinking process. The course is structured through regular weekly challenges designed to impart and practice specific skills and longer student-driven projects that offer the class an opportunity to achieve real world-style objectives such as designing a magazine cover or a flyer to encourage young people to vote. With the transition to hybrid education students have been engaged in workshops that introduce them to Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Throughout the course students have encountered the work of great graphic designers through research projects and learned the essentials of the field such as typography, hierarchy and the use of a grid via teacher presentations and related exercises. Students will finish out the semester by proposing and then completing three self-selected projects for their final portfolio.
Challenges
Challenges are designed to take place over the course of a week. They include drawing exercises, simple layout activities and typographic explorations. They are meant to be low pressure explorations with quick,
evident results.
Projects
Projects take place over the course of a unit or two and last three to six weeks. Projects enable students to demonstrate key understandings in the discipline of graphic design such as hierarchy, the use of a grid, color choices and typography.
