Борнмутский университет искусств, MA, Graphic Design

The MA Graphic design represents an exciting opportunity for you to challenge and build on your previous achievements and to study at an advanced level.

The course provides specific discipline-focused project work aimed at enabling you to take the right path towards your chosen career in industry or progress to further study at doctorate level.

The first unit, Strategies for practice: Materials, methods, contexts, encourages you to dismantle practice and to identify the assumptions on which your practice is based.

The course is designed to help you develop a keen intellectual understanding in the application of critical reasoning to your existing practice and this unit introduces you to theoretical frameworks appropriate to your discipline and to a range of methods used in practice-based experimentation and research.

Innovation, collaboration and communication are key skills taught by professionals and academics in this unit, along with an understanding of the trans-disciplinary nature of contemporary creative practices.

A Professional Development Portfolio is produced over the period of study providing a means to gather evidence in support of your career aspirations and as a way of documenting your practice.

We are highly aware of, and very responsive to, the needs and professional aspirations of graduates as they progress to meet the future demands of the professional work-related environment. In this respect we are committed to the maintenance of currency and constantly alert to the trends within graphic design and its allied fields.

The Master’s project 1: Investigate, propose, experiment unit marks a shift from a predominantly taught, toward a supervisory mode of study. In this unit you will engage in experimentation and primary and secondary research around a focus of study.

This exploration is directed toward the development of a Study Plan which defines the project that will be refined and implemented in the final unit: Master’s project 2: Resolution, presentation and evaluation. This unit sustains and fuses your engagement with theory, research methods, experimentation and the context of your focus of study through practice and presentations to students and staff.

Set within a community and culture of makers, students engage in dialogue and debate with their peers irrespective of their preferred discipline. This experience provides dynamic and interactive sessions, which are vital to the enhancement of new thinking and ideas generation as well as offering a critical arena for discussion of student work.

• BA (Hons) Degree graded at 2.1 or above, or an equivalent UK or international qualification in your chosen subject or a related discipline.
• IELTS minimum overall score of 6.5 with a minimum of 5.5 in each component (reading, writing, speaking, listening).

The MA Graphic Design course encourages designers to explore ways of developing understanding between communicators.

You will do this by systematically interrogating design practice, by using design methods to analyse and comprehend situations and behaviour, and by generating alternative and novel visual solutions.

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) where they may have studied photography, architecture, illustration, interaction design, 3D design, fine art, or subjects such as journalism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, or sociology.

Whatever your background, you will 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.

Your practice can take many forms: it can be self-expressive, or socially orientated; print, 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 that is defined as part of your study. Graphic Designers often work in groups, sometimes comprising members from different disciplines.

The MA Graphic Design course provides opportunities to work in interdisciplinary ways because 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, you will 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.