Graphic Design - Bachelor of Fine Arts

Chris Myers
cmyers@uarts.edu
Chairperson
215-717-6226

Program Total Credits: 123

The Graphic Design program delivers a professional degree that develops the student’s mastery and expertise in the current marketplace for the practice of graphic design or a related communications-oriented field. Graduates will have experienced both hierarchical and non-hierarchical forms of collaboration as professional preparation, as well as the development of a unique intellectual and visual voice. Graduates will also possess the flexibility to adapt to a changing, unpredictable world and its communication needs where the methods of communication can be expected to evolve and expand.

Program Goals:

• Teach students through paradigms rather than through projects. Train students as generalists within the field of visual communication to provide them with flexibility both within the culture of professional practice and in the evolving communications milieu of a shrinking, yet increasingly differentiated world.
• Teach students from context throughout the curriculum, providing an introduction to human centered, cultural, and systemic contexts.
• Evolve student-centered teaching strategies and apply them to students’ design processes.
• Develop in students a strong work ethic driven by both logical and inventive working processes.
• Develop student’s self-critical abilities.
• Expose students to audiences that reflect diverse sensibilities or backgrounds. Evolve an ethical framework based upon an obligation to others, especially to those unlike themselves.
• Provide experiences for students that model or expose various forms of collaborative, both hierarchical and non-hierarchical.
• Develop in students a high level of expertise within industry-standard technological environments. Develop the propensity to prototype for high-level, complex technologically-based practices.
• Introduce strategic thinking and the ability to explain these strategies as a fundamental aspect of their design process.
• Develop the unique and individual voice of the student, both the intellectual and visual invention.