Master of Arts in Illustration with Professional Placement

at Kingston University London - Kingston School of Art, Knights Park United Kingdom

This course will help you to develop the skills and knowledge required to operate as a project manager in the creative industry.

If you are a creative practice graduate who understands making and production processes and, you would like to perfect skills required to lead and design projects, then this is the course for you. Or perhaps you're a mid-career creative practitioner, who wants to develop your commercial and operational skills and understanding but, need to contextualise your learning within the collaborative manner of creative projects? If so, then this course is also for you.

Creative careers are varied, full of change and frequently project-based, so developing project management skills, at postgraduate level, is a huge advantage.

On this course you will also study for a professional Agile PM Practitioner certificate. This certification is accredited by the Agile Project Management Group and is internationally recognised. The inclusion of such a widely recognised certification process in the programme is to further enhance your career and employability prospects.

The aim of the User Experience Design MSc course is to equip you with the behavioural theory, design practice and technology know-how that is necessary for a career as interaction designer, usability engineer, user researcher, or head of user experience. It focuses upon the analysis, design, prototyping and evaluation of multimedia, multi-modal, and multi-platform user interfaces that are easy to use and support a great user experience.

Each taught module guides students through a UX project – to optimise an interaction, to innovate a digital lifestyle, to create a persuasive product, and to collaborate on the development of virtual reality. Each project provides opportunities to analyse, design, prototype and evaluate cutting-edge technologies, follow industry trends and apply contemporary theories. A final "capstone" project completes the student's portfolio.

This course was developed in consultation with our industry panel, which includes Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, DreamWorks and Samsung Design Europe. Kingston University is an active member of TIGA, the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) and supports the User Experience Professionals' Association (UXPA UK).

This course allows you to experiment and explore your creative potential, preparing you for a career in the visual arts or creative industries. Students work with a range of traditional and new technologies, developing their ideas through sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, film / photography, performance and sound.

Kingston is ranked No.9 in the UK for art (Guardian University Guide league tables 2020).

Key to the course is the professional skills modules, which will help you acquire strategic skills for planning, showing, recording and communicating your work.

You'll get to hear from visiting artists and take part in live external projects. Our industry links include the Tate, Stanley Picker Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Drawing Room and Auto Italia.

You'll be taught by practising artists, writers and curators in purpose built workshops and you'll have the option to go on field trips and study abroad. By the time you graduate you'll have gained real-life experience and skills and completed a portfolio that will help kick-start your career.

Do you want to become a professional within the specialist field of historic building conservation? On this course, you'll visit many of London's fascinating historic buildings to illustrate and inform your learning. Past and ongoing works at the Historic Royal Palaces, together with several national and local heritage organisations and practitioners, are used to support your project work.

The course is interdisciplinary and international. Current and former students include archaeologists, architects, architectural technologists, chartered surveyors, craftsmen, engineers, and project and construction managers.

You will have opportunities to work alongside other postgraduates in the Faculty and the wider university, including those studying architecture and landscape architecture.

This two-year conversion course, accredited by the Landscape Institute, is aimed at graduates and professionals from disciplines including architecture, spatial design and ecology who can bring their knowledge, expertise, inquiry and creativity to the expanding field of landscape architecture. It is designed to engage with the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary landscape practice and research, as well as new opportunities for creative collaboration and co-production.

The Fashion MA at Kingston University is a unique and innovative course combining the creative thinking of the Design School core beliefs with a very solid and 'creative' fashion industry focus.

With a heritage and specialism in womenswear, menswear, knitwear, digital or fashion artefact outcomes, the course combines industry standards with a creative and contemporary approach to fashion design developing a holistic and exciting approach to fashion design and beyond.

Our broad design community and positioning as a progressive and highly-rated design institution means that Fashion can actively collaborate and share ideas with others across the Design School.

Photography is pivotal to fine art, fashion, advertising and editorial photography, as well as digital applications: this course is centred on the making and understanding of photographic production and critical thinking; applied to any subject area.

You'll study both analogue and digital photography; the key focus of the course is for you to develop your creative ideas alongside your professional skills, within a multi-genre approach to the medium. The course takes maximum advantage of Kingston's proximity to the vibrant art, photography and cultural life of London, one of the major photographic art and commercial centres of the world.

There will be opportunities to work with historic manual processes such as cyanotypes and salt prints as well as other 'craft' processes including creating unique one-off photobooks.

We have been ranked in the top 25 Fashion Schools in the World, and one of only three in the UK, by Fashionista, the influential and trusted source of fashion news. View the 2019 rankings.

Our Fashion BA (Hons) degree is ranked no. 1 in London for Fashion in The Guardian University Guide league table 2020 and was one of  a handful of worldwide institutions to have been awarded four badges of excellence by the Business of Fashion (for Best Overall, Best in Global Influence, Best in Learning Experience and Best in Long-term Value).

The course focuses on evolution and radical change in design. You will explore how design is influenced by cultural, social, critical and historical studies.

You will develop your own signature style, experimenting across sketch work, 2D to 3D, knitwear and digital print in Kingston School of Art's workshops and dedicated fashion design studios. You will also have access to our working dress archive which includes pieces from 1750 to the present day, including the recently acquired Sibling knitwear archive. Our curator also works closely with Bath Fashion Museum.

Our strong industry links mean you will learn to apply creativity to the real-world and will be industry-ready on graduation.

This course, one of a suite of digital media courses, enables you to study professional digital media practice in a microstudio environment with a focus on the design skills necessary for the field of games development. Through a student-centred, project-based curriculum, you will work as a games designer to develop your specialist skills while working as part of an interdisciplinary team with students from across the full programme.

• This course has been developed in consultation with our industry panel, and we are an educational partner of Sony Interactive Entertainment through PlayStation First. We are also an active member of TIGA, the games industry's representative body.
• This course has been designed to utilise the best digital media expertise and resources from across the University, and will prepare you for employment in the digital media industry, where teams of specialists work together to develop and author innovative digital media projects.

Kingston School of Art offers a stimulating environment for the postgraduate study of Illustration. Kingston University has some of the best fabrication and visual process workshops in the UK. This enables the most exciting innovations in ‘thinking through making'.

The Communication Design: Illustration MA course, offered through the highly-regarded Department of Illustration Animation, aims to develop creative professional understanding of Illustration in the context of communication design.

The course is structured to challenge you and your preconceptions about both illustration and design. It places an emphasis on the patterns of research you develop and the visual methods you employ to explore and unravel briefs. You will be expected to demonstrate how you research and develop your ideas. In this context, research is not only a working process it can also be considered an outcome in its own right.

This programme asks you to examine: what, how, why and who as key factors in design thinking. This represents a shift from the traditional definition of design and illustration as a problem solving activity to a placing the focus on problem finding. The course encourages the exploration and understanding of the methods and processes at work in contemporary illustration.

This course has been designed to enhance your long-term employment possibilities through an appreciation of the changing global, technological and social context of illustration and design. It includes the option of a one-year UK work placement, enhancing your experience and connections in industry. This type of assessed placement is not available on any other postgraduate courses.