Graphic Communication

The preliminary and intensive Integrated Foundation in Art and Design is designed to develop your ideas, skills and confidence in readiness for progressing to year one of your degree programme.

This year provides you with the opportunity to identify, apply for, and secure professional experience, normally comprising one to three placements over a minimum of nine months. Successful completion of this module will demonstrate your ability to secure and sustain graduate-level employment.

By completing the module, you'll be entitled to the addition of 'with Professional Placement Year' to your degree title.

Before your Professional Placement Year, you'll work to secure your placement, constructing a development plan with your module leader and your placement coordinator from our Careers and Employability team.

On your return to University for your final year, you'll submit your Placement Portfolio, detailing your development on your placement, for assessment.

We teach you the critical, technical and aesthetic skills necessary to become a professional graphic communicator: designer, typographer, illustrator, or image­maker. You’ll discover the varied and complex nature of design practice.

Our aim is that you’ll graduate as a strategic thinker, innovator and maker, having produced creative and challenging outcomes across a range of media or within your chosen specialist area.

Year one
You’ll study carefully-structured studio modules examining the core aspects of graphic communications, typography and image. You’ll learn to conceptualise, produce, and critique type and images. Attending specialist workshops will help you develop practical skills.

Workshops include: drawing, screen­printing, letterpress, etching and lithography, photography (analogue and digital), motion graphics, and animation (analogue and digital). You’ll gain an awareness of the industry through a Professional Contexts module, and a contextual framework through a Historical and Critical Studies module.

Year two
You’ll explore interactive media in the context of type and image. You can choose to focus on graphic design, illustration or interactive media, or keep an interdisciplinary approach. A Professional Development module will help you consider and develop your professional identity as a practitioner and your Historical and Contextual Studies module will prepare you for your dissertation.

Year three
You’ll produce of a series of portfolio projects. Live briefs will give you experience of dealing with clients, real production problems, and solutions. Portfolio clinics conducted by professional designers help you consider and prepare your portfolio before graduation, and career workshops help you get ready for career networking, opportunity finding or further study.

You’ll be assessed in two ways. Firstly, during your studio modules there will be critiques, advice and commentary from your tutor or peers about your work (formative assessment). Secondly, after you present your research and you final design outcomes, you’ll receive written feedback with a mark from your tutor (summative feedback).

You’ll learn through a variety of methods including directed technical workshops, lectures, small group seminars, and, most frequently, through the practice of making in specialist tutor-led studio sessions. Working in studio-sized groups with a dedicated specialist tutor, you’ll develop typography, image making and illustration skills. By responding to set design problems and participating in the frequent studio critiques with tutors and peers, you’ll develop strong critical and reflective abilities.

Self-directed learning is facilitated through materials on Minerva – Bath Spa University’s Virtual Learning Environment – and other web-based resources. You’ll also have access to our specialist art and design library.

You’ll have the opportunity to study in a wide range of locations around the world. Our students have completed exchange programmes in a variety of countries including Spain, Sweden and the USA.

Our course is linked with universities in Lucerne and Leipzig. We have students study at non-European exchange programmes in Japan, Australia and the USA. We also have links in China.

We offer an international study trip to first and second-year students. Past destinations have included New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Cuba, Iceland, Amsterdam, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Morocco, and Beijing. You’ll have a chance to meet and talk with internationally acclaimed designers, illustrators, design writers and curators in their studios.

There are also visits to museums and galleries. Additionally, each year will have a study day-trip, typically to London, to review key exhibitions.

We have good industry links. These include a final year personal portfolio review session, where you’ll benefit from real industry advice on your portfolio and presentation techniques from established practising designers and illustrators.

Our graduates become graphic designers, art directors, illustrators, animators, and interactive media designers. They work across the full range of the creative media industry including advertising, motion graphics, photography, and digital and print publishing.

We encourage our students to participate in design competitions and our third year students must develop one competition brief as part of a final year portfolio. Past students have had success with D&AD New Blood as well as other national competitions.

Each year final year students can be nominated for sponsored awards: The Ripe Prize for Graphic Communication Project of the Year; and The Emtone Prize for Outstanding Graphic Communication Student of the Year.

Our Art and Design courses are based at our Locksbrook Road (2019) and Sion Hill campuses.

You’ll benefit from access to:

• New, purpose-built facilities, specifically designed to encourage creative cross-disciplinary encounters with other artists and designers
• Our libraries
• Dedicated subject librarian
• Writing and Learning Centre
• Virtual Learning Environment
• English Language Unit.

You’ll have access to a range of resources, designed to ease workflow and facilitate creative and experimental practice. This includes access to both traditional analogue and cutting-edge digital technology. Our studios feature new Mac computers connected to digital printing. Large format colour printing is available in the adjacent technical workshop.