Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Study Details: Two years (60 weeks) Extended full-time
MA Graphic Communication Design explores how the production of knowledge is intertwined with its form, context, and circulation. The course takes an expanded approach to the idea of research, combining studio and writing practice to engage critically with graphic design as both a creative practice and a subject of study. Through iterative and open-ended experimentation with visual media and tools of communication, students develop work that investigates existing knowledge, activates positions, and projects new forms of knowledge—within and beyond the discipline.
Engaging with studio and writing practice as a form of rigorous enquiry, students and staff together explore how graphic design is a situated and relational discipline that both reflects and reconfigures its cultural, social, and environmental conditions. From this position, our community of practitioners critically interrogates the academic and professional contexts for practice as well as the very nature of the discipline itself, continually co-defining and re-defining the expanding field of graphic design.
MA Graphic Communication Design, along with BA Graphic Communication Design and a small group of PhD students, is part of the Graphic Communication Design programme. In addition to sharing an academic team and studio spaces, the programme offers a range of extracurricular events, lectures, live briefs, and other activities.
Engaging with climate, racial and social justice in the Graphic Communication Design Community at Central Saint Martins
The accelerating climate and ecological emergency is exposing the unsustainability and injustice of the political, social, and economic systems that have created them. An overarching goal for our programme community has necessarily become to question how graphic communication design practices can critique and intervene in the systems of extraction and exploitation that have led us to the brink of collapse.
We select applicants according to potential and current ability in the following areas:
It's easier and more affordable to print a newspaper or a book, publish a web page, or shoot and edit a video than it's ever been before. This democratisation of media is energising, but what becomes of the professional designer? By asking important questions such as why we design, what it means to claim identities as graphic communication designers, and where being a designer may take us, graduates of MA Graphic Communication Design are well equipped to take a pro-active and innovative approach to building their futures.
Our interrogative approach to careers is underpinned by a wide range of practical exposure and support. Students attend weekly Graphic Communication Design programme lectures by contemporary practitioners, which explore a variety of professional practices and offer insights into life as a designer. The programme also hosts alumni events where graduates share their experiences and network with students. The university also provides a wide range of practical careers support available to all students at UAL.
Our graduates have gone on to launch their own studios and publishing companies, work for large-scale institutions and corporations around the world, freelance in their chosen areas, or develop their own new models for design practice. An increasing number of our graduates are following the MA with PhD study and choosing to pursue a design research career.
On MA Graphic Communication Design, coursework and learning build successively across three units. In response to project briefs set by tutors and through independent planning, you will develop a body of studio and written work that explores graphic design as a research practice, articulates your positions, and extends the propositions of your work through attention to form and production.
Presentation, discussion, and critique are essential to the development of your practice and provide the foundation for learning on the course. This will happen in group and individual tutorials as well as through tutor-led, peer-to-peer, and self-reflective assessment. In addition, you will interrogate existing and new contexts of practice through reading groups and seminars, and you will develop a critical engagement with form through short making-led workshops.
A series of course lectures consolidates knowledge across all units and further supports progression through the curriculum by providing broader context for the study and practice of graphic communication design.
A note on unit titles: In the field of logic, the arrow symbol [→] is used to indicate a material implication. For example, Methods → Positions could be read as Methods imply Positions. The double-headed arrow [↔] is used to indicate a material equivalence. Thus, Methods ↔ Positions could be read as either Methods means the same as Positions or Methods if and only if Positions. In the case of unit titles in MA Graphic Communication Design, these symbols are used to indicate that differentiated aspects of practice are, in fact, not only cumulative but co-defining.
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