Design
MADRID

Sculpt light. Re-color the world. Magnify. Reduce. Blur. Sharpen. Capture. Release. Record a decisive moment or make one. This class explores techniques in using the digital camera as a tool in visual experimentation.

The ubiquity of the video and the global stage of online hosting sites give the power of the moving image to the masses. Learn cinematic styles, how to edit audio and video, and use special effects to tell a story with motion and sound.

Classes and internships have lead you to a final body of work that represents your skills, execution and personality. Finalize your website, physical portfolios and prepare to keep your portfolio up-to-date for the rest of your career.

In this course you will develop a broad understanding of motion graphics, production concepts, design tools and the enabling techniques while acquiring a working vocabulary through a series of structured problem-solving activities.

An introduction to the tools that’ll bring your ideas to life: the digital SLR camera and Adobe Photoshop. You’ll learn how to put this tag team to work for you, how to process RAW Images and organization with Adobe Bridge.

Typography, its history and aesthetics, type specification and font selection. This class is a power class because, without it you are powerless to communicate.

Learn to talk the talk and walk the walk of a graphic designer. This class is all about the creative process of design. Composition, organization, complexity, structure, form, line, color theory, mass, grids and scale. Wow!

Craft is in the bones of a graphic designer. Craft can be, binding a book of your designs, silkscreening a logo on a sweatshirt, making a scale model of a chair you designed in Photoshop or Illustrator, or building a scale model of a bridge. Trust us––when you go for an interview in any graphic design studio, anywhere in the world, craftsmanship will give you the edge.

A fancy word for developing sign-based relationships which are the basis of storytelling and design thinking, combining semantics, syntactics, pragmatics and gestalt design theory design. Got that, right?

Earlier classes have explored typography, photography, symbols, even storytelling. Other classes have given you skills in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Now it’s time to put all these together to produce publications. Now you must take a reader from cover to cover, page to page, and surprise, inform, educate, excite, or provoke them. You will combine every skill you have learned so far.

Think up, design and create innovative 3-D structures for all kinds of products and brands. Build your concepts in the school’s fully-equipped Makers Studio. Or, print your ideas with a 3-D printer. Making stuff is a designer’s dream.

Design and produce your own website. Deal with interfaces, wireframes and navigation. Learn how to use strong graphic images to convey your message. Hopefully you will get a lot of hits. Happily we’ll give you an “A”.

Start with logic. Explore with message and context. Think how you might interpret a meaning in the simplest and most immediate form. How will color, tone or texture impact a symbol? What kind of symbol would you design or yourself?

This class will bust your brain. The sky is not even the limit. We’re talking outer, way-outer space here. What kind of environment can you conjure up? How many senses can you excite? Titillate? Reward? What far out technology can use use? Or what simple technology can you use in a far out way? What urban issue can you solve? What environmental activism can you provoke? Go for it.

How is meaning created through word and image and design? Or sound?

Innovative innovative retail packaging systems are the goal. Structural design, physical properties of paper and corrugated boards, sustainability in packaging, emotive branding, and spatial efficiency are the challenges.

Design. Advertising. Whatever. Everything is about brands and branding and how you can use use design-thinking to express brand solutions.

Content. Message. Put these together in a meaningful visual to inform or enhance or clarify. Big data made simple.

Dive into the social aspects of marketing. Develop socially responsible projects and programs that enable organizations to differentiate themselves. Use of social networking, online marketing and new media, are crucial to an organizations’ long-term viability. Utilize a number of different platforms such as print, web and screen based media, motion and experimental design.

Type and image. Mother and Father. Fire and water. Put these opposites together in a way no one else ever has. Love them equally please. Each needs the other.

This is one very super important class. How do you create immersive and collaborative experiences that might change the way people view and interact with the messaging in a whole new way? New concepts, ideas and media –photography, videos, surface technology and rich visualizations from application design to gaming. Oh my!

Beginning with the Victorian era to to the present, you will explore visual communications developments in both design and technology. And, through this exposure perhaps gain insight into your own design sensibility.

Developing the context for successful user experiences requires designers to think more holistically about the business models for the products they create. What tools should be used? What methods? What options? Above all—why?

Now that you have the basics of typography this class pushes you to more sophisticated and expressive type solutions. Now you can move into developing your own personal style of typographic solution.

Retail branding and the understanding of a personality behind the brand within apparel and fashion. Develop a visual language to allow rapid prototyping through different mediums. Use type, shape, color, form, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space and proportion, to create a visual story for a brand.