Course summary

The Graphic Design BA aims to provide an intellectual and creative space for you to explore and develop a wide range of skills and understanding around the discipline of graphic design. This is applied through a variety of current and emerging technologies and processes for visual communication. The evolving and fluid forms of published and experiential exchanges include interactions with audiences and users across digital, physical, and virtual environments. The breadth and range of the facilities and processes available support creative learning that is interdisciplinary, collaborative and professional – embracing technologies and practices found in current industry work environments. This course offers a flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-faceted approach to the study of contemporary graphic design practice across a broad range of contexts and projects that are industry facing as well as experimental, discipline critical and research led. It will prepare you with the highest level of practical and employable skills, knowledge and visual understanding required to both work and lead in this sector of the creative industry today. Study and learning on the course are encouraging, inclusive and supportive, fostering your aptitudes and individual expression in the work you produce while offering wide and in-depth visual inquiry and experimentation. Throughout the course, there is a wide range of optional choice modules that support individualised creative agility, enabling you to be flexible and resilient, while also making you industry ready to adapt your practice rapidly within evolving employments, periods of change, new and emerging communication and societal driven exchanges and technologies. The course fosters the development of employability skills and knowledge as well as work-based learning opportunities from your first year through to the final stages of the course. Two options reinforce and augment this ethos: either a year-long, professional placement or internship nationally or a year overseas in either an academic or work environment. The course has a strong professional focus and connections in conjunction with the University’s award-winning Westminster Enterprise Network, supporting all aspects of employability, from training, professional practice, self-promotion, work experience, interviewing and job opportunities. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside colleagues in generous studio spaces with excellent facilities for a range of digital technologies with access to facilities for working in more traditional media and processes. Key aspects of learning include UX (User eXperience design), visual effects, prototyping, AR (Augmented Reality), MR (Mixed Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality), branding and digital arts. You will also have access to analogue-making processes through the facility centres in printmaking, photography, three-dimensional fabrication and digital printing. Within your learning, you will be able to develop your awareness and understanding of the social contexts and environmental responsibilities of design, so that you can identify communication strategies that will enrich society and people's lives by enabling them to be better informed about the world in which we all live in and share. You'll learn to engage audiences through imaginative and creative design solutions that may challenge, persuade, shock, provoke, excite and entertain, but always inform. You'll also develop the transferable and cognitive skills necessary for lifelong personal and professional development. Alumni and specialists from the industry contribute to the teaching programme alongside our dedicated course team of experienced professional creatives and researchers.