Graphic Design

Richard Felton
rfelton@uarts.edu
Chairperson
215-717-6225

Graphic designers play a key role in our information-based society. They give form to the interface between users and our culture of rapidly proliferating products, places, processes, information, and services.

The Graphic Design Department, since its beginning, has sought to give students the basis to solve problems in communication in a way that merges concerns for fidelity to content, for the visual aesthetic, and for engaging the reader-viewer’s rapport.

The faculty and students are engaged in a collaborative process of exploring the “New” as it emerges. For graphic design, the New has meant specifically the transformation of media, which affects how messages are created and transmitted, and how the intersection of design, media, and culture are understood.

Throughout the three years of major concentration, problems in graphic communication are combined with exploratory and experimental studies in drawing, color, photography, typography, and emerging technologies. The curriculum is supplemented by special lecture programs; workshops with invited design firms; and on-site studio seminars in selected design offices and studios, paper and printing plants, museums and libraries, and with film and computer graphic producers.

Opportunities for additional study in fine arts, illustration, photography, animation, filmmaking, and emerging technologies are available.

Designers work across several media and venues–from handmade images to digital images, still images to time-based communications, and print-oriented problems to communications in cyberspace.

With successful completion of the program, students are prepared for entry-level positions as graphic designers with design studios, publishers, corporations, nonprofit institutions, governmental agencies, architects and planners, network or cable broadcasters, film and video producers, or advertising agencies.

The faculty are practicing professionals with distinguished records of accomplishment, sensitive and responsive to the changes in the field of design, yet not limited by its current practices.