Master of Arts in Graphic Design

at Arts University Bournemouth United Kingdom

The engaging and creative course will be your stepping stone to an exciting career in making.

With access to the latest technology and traditional resources, you will learn to make things using an extensive array of materials, tools, and techniques. You will develop the making skills needed for rewarding careers in film, architecture, exhibition, and design. You will develop as an independent thinker, who is capable of solving problems, and taking imaginative leaps in creative design and making.

You will work on live collaborative projects with students from other courses and with industry professionals. Using our strong links with the creative industries, you will have opportunities to undertake work experience with leading companies in the UK and abroad.

Our graduates have progressed in their careers to run departments at Pinewood Studios, RSHP, Foster + Partners, Chalk Studios and Rusty Squid. This course has been the first step in the journeys of many successful graduates, leaders, and innovators. You will get the opportunity to work in our award-winning and purpose-built ‘CRAB’ Drawing Studio, which was designed by Professor Sir Peter Cook RA.
You will also work in Passiv Haus and our well-equipped Printmaking Studio.

Students apply to the course predominantly from graphic design courses but are welcomed from a variety of backgrounds (if they can show an aptitude for typography). Students may have studied photography, architecture, illustration, interaction design, three-dimensional design, fine art, or, subjects such as journalism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology or sociology.

Whatever your background, you’ll be required to reflect on your worldview; the underlying assumptions and understanding that guides and constrains your practice, and to use this reflection as a starting point from which to further develop. Your practice can take many forms: it can be self-expressive, or socially orientated; print, screen-based or three-dimensional.

It can focus on an aspect of a well-defined area of design, such as branding, experimental typography, publishing, and user-centred design, or on something more unconventional defined as part of your study.

Graphic designers often work in groups, sometimes comprising members from different disciplines. MA Graphic Design provides many opportunities to work in interdisciplinary ways as it sits alongside the courses of other disciplines. Many of the taught sessions such as the introduction to research methods and processes occur in these interdisciplinary groups. At other times however you’ll be developing your project with your supervisor and other students on your course. This will require you to develop a theoretical framework, methodology and research methods that support your research focus.

As a graphic designer you should anticipate the possible consequences of your design interventions, including the meanings constructed through your practice, in relation to ethical and sustainability issues as well as to other relevant contexts. Creative approaches are required that respond to complex situations in which many problems reside. Outcomes are not constrained by media or by limited interpretations of what it is to be a graphic designer.

Consequently, an outcome might involve the design of an experience or service, as much as it might concern more conventional forms of graphic production.

Through the adaptive reuse, rebranding, remodelling, recycling and recommunication of existing spaces, structures and environments, this course will offer you the skills, knowledge and work experience that you need to become a leader in one of the most dynamic, creative, economically valuable and diverse areas of design.

Interior Architecture and Design has an enviable record in graduate employment, often working with clients on real design projects in a studio-based, professionally-focused learning environment.

We offer you the chance to gain extended work experience in your second year; a uniquely valuable opportunity among UK degree courses and one which increases your graduate employment potential. This course will teach you to understand the three-dimensional potential, the atmosphere, and the identity of the spaces in which we live, work, rest, and play.

BA (Hons) Costume offers a comprehensive approach to the study, interpretation and creation of costume. Students will become skilled at producing accurate historical recreations of costumes as well as expressing imaginative flair through creative and conceptual costume making. In addition, you will learn the art of tailoring and couture dressmaking.

Costume supervision is integral to the course and can be described as interpreting a two-dimensional costume design into a three-dimensional costume through sourcing and procuring garments. This exciting role places you at the heart of live productions, as you are key to ensuring the smooth running of the wardrobe department for all types of live performance.

The current BA (Hons) Costume and Performance Design course has been awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its ‘distinguished degree-level education in costume design for the UK’s leading creative industries’.

Our course is designed to provide you with a high-quality education in contemporary art practice, and is delivered by highly respected tutors, acclaimed artists and excellent technicians.

Over the duration of the course you will develop your individual artistic voice, informed through your own research and critical evaluation, peer and tutor’s feedback and a deep understanding of your chosen materials. When you graduate, you will be fully equipped to contribute and add something new to the UK’s art scene as an emerging artist.

Exhibiting and being enterprising is a key part of our course. We offer many opportunities for you to exhibit your work with an emphasis on site-specific locations thanks to our unique partnerships with local museums, councils and research centers. We also have a series of international student artist residency placements and worldwide partner university study exchanges. All these experiences are specially created by our tutors to give you a real sense of what it means to be a professional artist - both in the studio and the broader world.

In the first year you will work in open plan studios and participate in collective workshops to find what inspires and excites you as an artist. In the following years you will develop your practical, theoretical and critical skills within your self-defined study plans. The course culminates in two exhibitions of your work for your final major project, one on campus at Bournemouth and the second in London.

We support and encourage experimentation and development of skills, and workshops are offered as a continual part of the course over the 3 years. These are conducted in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, digital media and sonic art as well as seminars to foster your conceptual development and understanding of curation / how exhibitions are put together.

You will have additional access to the latest technology, such as laser cutters, CNC (computer numerically controlled) machines and 3D printers. Our aim is to provide you with a solid foundation so that you can create contemporary artworks with high technical skill combined with solid conceptual grounding.

Above all we offer a welcoming and inclusive course, set in a vibrant campus dedicated to creative practices of all kinds.

MA Illustration will appeal to you if you’re open to participating in a broad range of creative strategies, utilising traditional and digital methods.

These include drawing and printmaking, lens and time-based media, with ideas and concepts that might be realised through exhibition, publication or exciting new hybrid forms.

Students studying on the course come from a number of diverse backgrounds including Illustration, Graphic Design, Printmaking, Drawing, Photography and Painting. Others come from outside of art and design, having had experience across other subject disciplines, but demonstrating a passion for illustration.

MA Illustration is structured and delivered in order to encourage and support you in developing your own distinct visual language, recognising an expansive understanding of contemporary illustration through the exploration of relationships between illustrator as author, audience and context.

Ideas are developed through specific individual approaches to research into practice and reflective enquiry. This deeper understanding and commitment to practice assists students in identifying, exploring and achieving your future career aspirations. The course encourages you to engage imaginatively with illustration, in relation to both the academic subject and practice of illustration.

MA Illustration encourages you to question the nature of your practice and its context and position relative to the creative industries. The course encourages you to engage imaginatively with your practice in relation to the evolving academic subject and practice of illustration. Your practice will be considered in a global context, with an awareness of the emergence of new and innovative approaches that interrogate, challenge and advance traditional. As a graduate from MA Illustration, you’ll be able to carve your own niche in an evolving market for visual materials.

Performance designers are storytellers. Visual storytellers. BA (Hons) Performance Design and Film Costume creates innovative, individual and adaptable designers.

The performing body is at the core of the design work on this course and all students will create costume designs from the first year onwards. Great attention is paid to the study and design of historical, contemporary and experimental costume for film, theatre and site-specific projects.

In addition to costume design, some students will also go on to design and paint sets and make props and puppets for live performance, festivals, other events and exhibitions.

Some students will specialise in preparing themselves to work in the costume departments of film and TV productions with the aim of becoming costume designers in these industries.

The current BA Hons Costume and Performance Design course has been awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its ‘distinguished degree-level education in costume design for the UK’s leading creative industries'.

A career in creative writing could see you working in publishing, a literary agency, freelancing or in education — and that’s just the start. Whether you want to create prose, scripts, poetry or nonfiction, we’ll help you turn writing into a career.

With visits from published writers and industry professionals, you’ll be able to explore career opportunities and build contacts. When you graduate, you’ll have a strong portfolio and a professional network to kickstart your career.

Writers rarely work alone, so this course will give you the opportunity to collaborate with other courses. You might write scripts with animators or filmmakers, or explore narratives with illustrators.

Since the Harry Potter boom in the early 2000s, alongside a recent influx of new releases from studies, such as Disney and Marvel, the film and VFX industry has expanded at an exponential rate.

This has firmly established the UK as the leading country for high-quality Visual Effects work and created an unprecedented demand for fresh, highly-trained graduate talent from the UK education system. The course was created in response to an industry demand for visual effects artists who possess strong observational skills and the ability to apply them collaboratively in the workplace.

Designed from the ground up by industry professionals, specifically to address this demand, the primary ethos is to create the quality required for employability within the industry. Developing a foundation in traditional artistic techniques, such as drawing, colour theory, perspective, photography and composition, 125 you will learn what it takes to create your own feature film quality visual effects.

Our 2D workflow uses Nuke for all compositing, and Maya/Zbrush and Arnold for 3D, while our colour pipeline is based on an industry model with custom LUTs to ensure accurate monitoring of colour in our fully calibrated VFX labs. All of our VFX labs are equipped with top of the range industry-level workstations and are supported by our render farm, fibre network, and clustered storage. With smaller class sizes, students have full access to the VFX labs and workstations on specified lab days alongside a more personal, teaching approach. You will experience a team-based production process that replicates industry best practice; including previsualisation, concept development, on-set data acquisition, asset building, and compositing. We’ll introduce you to the underlying concepts and fundamental principles of Visual Effects work and teach you the necessary creative and technological disciplines, developing your knowledge of 2D and 3D software.

The course prides itself on the currency of its staff. You will be taught by industry professionals that between them have worked at studios, including ILM, Framestore, Double Negative, Electronic Arts, MPC, Image Engine, Weta Digital and many more. We have taken the knowledge gained at these studios and have brought it into the classroom. Having worked in the industry at the highest levels, we not only know what makes a strong artist, but also what the visual effects industry is looking for. We are focused on our graduates’ successful entry into the VFX industry, as well as them having a long and successful career.

The visual effects industry community is very close, much like a family where everyone knows each other. Through the personal connections of our industry experienced staff we are able to bring in top class guest speakers, such as Christian Manz, Creative Director, Film at Framestore and Sue Lyster, Director of Studio Operations, and ILM, to name a few recent guests.

Visual Communication combines skills in illustration, graphic design, typography and digital design to create images that persuade or inform.

From the start, the course focuses on hand-drawn imagery to develop a feel for the shapes and styles that connect with audiences. Practical experiences will be used to develop your skills. We’ll help you to build your visual awareness and understanding of the world around you. In addition to plenty of theory and debate, you’ll have the chance to work on live briefs with other students and find work placements in creative businesses.

Visual Communication underlines the importance of good ideas. You’ll leave with all the practical skills that you need to work in a vibrant and exciting industry. Our graduates work as freelancers in small design companies and with larger firms, both locally and internationally.