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This course is for you if you want to enhance your existing professional portfolio and expand and deepen your understanding of graphic design practice.
Year of entry
Location
Coventry University (Coventry)
Study mode
Full-time
Part-time
Duration
1 year full-time
2 years part-time
16-24 months (with professional experience)
Course code
AHT040 (full-time)
ADT082 (part-time)
Start date
September 2025
January 2026
May 2026
At Coventry University, we continuously review the courses we offer to ensure we reflect industry-relevant emerging best practice and technology. As a result, this course is undergoing continuous improvement assessment and will be launched with a renewed curriculum starting in September 2025. Module content and titles will be updated. Course title, learning outcomes and assessments may also change. We expect our new curriculum to be fully updated by January 2025. Please return to this page to see the final course details.
You will have the chance to explore graphic design practice through practical design work shaped by design principles, and design processes that can include a wide range of disciplines.
The Coventry University School of Art and Design is home to a vibrant and long-established postgraduate teaching and learning community.
The course aims to offer the benefit of working with international cohorts and Collaborative Online International Learning Projects (COIL) which provide an international perspective from the associated peer learning opportunities2.
The Coventry Degree Show is an annual event to celebrate and showcase our graduating students’ work.
Explore the work of our talented studentsThis course is centred around generating ideas and producing practical outcomes, underpinned by research-led processes and current discourse. This is achieved through intensive and challenging creative briefs, underpinned by sound academic research, self-critical reflection and contextually relevant practice. You can expect to participate in projects that range across many topical and current themes in design.
You will have the chance to engage and explore graphic design through practical design work experimenting with a wide range of digital and analogue media4.
The course is suitable for applicants who have already undertaken a sustained period of creative practice in education or industry, and who wish to enhance their career as designers.
The professional experience opportunity2 enables you to apply for an optional professional experience in semester 1, which, upon successfully securing an opportunity, will extend the duration of your master’s to either 16, 20 or 24 months. The professional experience provides an opportunity for you to develop expertise and experience in your chosen field with the aim of enhancing your employability.
Please note that the optional professional experience modules incur an additional tuition fee3, which for 1 semester of professional experience is £1,333.33, for 2 semesters of professional experience is £2,666.67, and for 3 semesters of professional experience is £4,000.
Professional experience may also be subject to additional costs, visa requirements being met, subject to availability and/or competitive application. Professional experience opportunities are not guaranteed but you will benefit from the support of our Talent Team in trying to find and secure an opportunity. Find out more about the professional experience option.
We regularly review our course content, to make it relevant and current for the benefit of our students. For these reasons, course modules may be updated.
In a typical teaching week, teaching methods include a combination of:
The contact hours may be made up of a combination of face-to-face teaching, individual and group tutorials, and online activities.
The School of Art and Design often provides opportunities to engage in external or collaborative activities such as competition/industry briefs and speakers beyond your course studies2. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of these opportunities to support your learning journey.
Part-time students typically undertake one module or 30 credits worth of learning per semester.
This course can be offered on a part-time basis. While we would like to give you all the information about our part-time offering here, it is tailored for each course each year depending on the number of part-time applicants. Therefore, the part-time teaching arrangements vary. Request further information about part-time study.
The number of full-time contact hours may vary from semester to semester, however, on average, it is likely to be around eight contact hours per week in the first year. The contact hours may be made up of a combination of face-to-face teaching, individual and group tutorials, and online classes and tutorials.
Additionally, you will be expected to undertake significant self-directed study of approximately 24 hours each week, depending on the demands of individual modules. In these hours you will be applying that knowledge to your ongoing assignments. Every student is different and manages workloads differently so this can vary across students and times of the year.
Part of university life is undertaking self-directed learning (SDL). Across the course of the week, you will have non ‘taught’ time that allows you to work independently to apply the skills you have learnt in taught or facilitated sessions to your projects or assignment briefs. This is particularly important in the School of Art and Design as it allows you to put into practice making in workshop and studio spaces.
This self-directed learning allows you to monitor and self-evaluate your development and how best to manage this time to best impact your creative work. SDL is key to designing and making as it is a process that takes discipline and repetition. This mode of learning underpins our community of practice approach.
As an innovative and enterprising institution, the university may seek to utilise emerging technologies within the student experience. For all courses (whether on-campus, blended, or distance learning), the university may deliver certain contact hours and assessments via online technologies and methods.
Since COVID-19, we have delivered our courses in a variety of forms, in line with public authority guidance, decisions, or orders and we will continue to adapt our delivery as appropriate. Whether on campus or online, our key priority is staff and student safety.
This course will be assessed using a variety of methods which could vary depending upon the module.
Assessment methods include:
The Coventry University Group assessment strategy ensures that our courses are fairly assessed and allows us to monitor student progression towards achieving the intended learning outcomes.
Coventry School of Art and Design has a multinational population and you will have the opportunity2 to work alongside students from all over the globe. We see this as a particular strength of the course as it enables you to work alongside students from differing cultural backgrounds and design perspectives. The capacity to work across cultural and disciplinary boundaries is becoming an essential skill in our ever-more interconnected world.
Collaborative learning may include exchange lectures by international academics and visiting tutors from our link universities in the UK and abroad2.
Student | Full-time | Part-time |
---|---|---|
UK, Ireland*, Channel Islands or Isle of Man | 2025/26 fees TBC 2024/25 fees - £11,200 | £15,200 (with prof. experience) |
Request fee information |
EU | 2025/26 fees TBC 2024/25 fees - £11,200 | £15,200 (with prof. experience) per year with EU Support Bursary** 2025/26 fees TBC 2024/25 fees - £18,600 | £22,600 (with prof. experience) per year without EU Support Bursary** |
Not available |
International | 2025/26 fees TBC 2024/25 fees - £18,600 | £22,600 (with prof. experience) |
Not available |
For advice and guidance on tuition fees3 and student loans visit our Postgraduate Finance page.
We offer a range of international scholarships to students all over the world. For more information, visit our International Scholarships page.
Tuition fees3 cover the cost of your teaching, assessments, facilities and support services. There may be additional costs not covered by this fee such as accommodation and living costs, recommended reading books, stationery, printing and re-assessments should you need them.
The following are additional costs not included in the tuition fees:
The rights of Irish residents to study in the UK are preserved under the Common Travel Area arrangement. If you are an Irish student and meet the residency criteria, you can study in England, pay the same level of tuition fees as English students and utilise the Tuition Fee Loan.
Following the UK's exit from the European Union, we are offering financial support to all eligible EU students who wish to study an undergraduate or a postgraduate degree with us full-time. This bursary will be used to offset the cost of your tuition fees to bring them in line with that of UK students. Students studying a degree with a foundation year with us are not eligible for the bursary.
Our aim is to offer you sector-leading facilities in a dedicated environment4. The Delia Derbyshire complex includes a hyper studio designed for cross-disciplinary projects and immersive studios with cutting-edge virtual reality and mixed-reality technologies.
Our digital and printing workshops bring your ideas to life through different media4. You’ll find a high-powered laser cutter, 3D printers, scanners and traditional print-making and making workshops for etching, silk-screen printing, relief printing and woodwork, as well as a generously stocked letterpress room.
Maximise your learning in our cutting-edge computer suites4. You'll have access to PCs and Macs running the latest industry-standard software needed for your course, including graphic design packages such as Adobe Creative Suite.
In the School of Art and Design, we shape our teaching and assessment methods to replicate the creative industry’s ways of working. This includes working in a studio-centric working environment.
Upon successful completion, you will be able to:
You will be expected to graduate with relevant industry experience, having worked with a variety of design professionals (subject to availability). Depending on your individual study, you may also benefit from a range of transferrable skills highly sought after by future employers, including team working, working independently, critical thinking, report writing, project management, ideas generation, presentation and finance.
National and international graduate career prospects are many and varied and in the past have included: education, curating, film, television, special effects, print and publishing, multimedia, advertising, animation, moving image, web and interactive design, video games, music, marketing and public relations.
Recent graduates have gone on to undertake PhDs, to lecture, to set up their own businesses, to freelance and to work as graphic designers for: DCA Design International, Deeply Digital, Nexus, and Senior Designer at Experimental Productions.