Graphic Design BA (Hons) 2021/22 entry

• The course has maintained three successive years of overall student satisfaction in excess of 80% (NSS 2017, NSS 2018, NSS 2019).
• Strong graduate employability record – 90% of graduates in work or further study after six months (DLHE 2014/15).
• The School of Art and Design is an ‘Adobe Partner by Design’, as well as being an Adobe Outstanding Centre of Excellence. Whilst the University hopes and anticipates that this Partnership continues, if it were to dissolve, we would notify applicants and students as soon as possible.
• Current, excellent links with industry, many of whom in the past have offered employment, placements or professional guidance to our students, like IBM, Opus Books and Design Bridge.
• Access to a network of practitioners through our Creative Voices speakers programme and regular studio visits, both local and international. Past speakers include Craig Oldham, Anthony Burrill and Jonathan Barnbrook. Previous studio visits include Pearlfisher, AKQA, Design Bridge, Kontrapunkt, Pentagram and JKR.
• Opportunity to participate in self-funded study trips abroad to places like Cyprus, Finland and Australia through the Erasmus scheme, as well as Holland and China as part of shorter cultural trips (subject to availability, competitive application process, meeting visa requirements and additional costs).
• Strong track record of student success in national and international competitions. In recent years, these have included: first prize and runners-up for the Penguin Student Design Awards book cover design competition; a D&AD Yellow Pencil and ‘Best of the Year’ commendations; nominations for YCN;
• Opportunities to work collaboratively with Coventry University Graphic Design students based in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

The course normally lasts three years when studied full-time and four to six years part-time. After successfully completing the first two years of the course, you can opt to take a sandwich year and spend a year on a professional placement or studying abroad with students previously studying design in countries including Australia, Germany, Finland and Spain (subject to availability, a competitive application process, meeting visa requirements and additional costs).

Teaching on the course has a double purpose: enabling you to acquire fundamental design skills and experience a breadth of design contexts and allowing you to shape the development of specialist skills in line with your personal creative identity. As such, the course balances taught sessions with independent and self-directed practice. Both are necessary to ensure you build an individualised collection of work for your portfolio that meets industry standards, is considerate of its context and can contribute positively to current conversations around design. Our agile teaching responds to your progress and is sensitive to changing student requirements. Students are taught via a range of similar activities with changing scope and focus across all modules. These activities will mostly comprise of lectures, workshops, seminars and tutorials.

The course is practice- based and teaching days involve engagement with the off key concepts and processes through a variety of hands-on activities and debates. This leads to rich and dynamic ideas underpinning your design thinking. A typical teaching day might start with a lecture framing the focus of the day. You might then engage in small-group seminars, discussing and exploring new ideas with your peers, or a full-class workshop aimed at putting into practice new methods and approaches. We engage regularly in critique sessions and tutorials and in doing so you are encouraged to develop your communication skills and become a strong advocate for your own work. These are key opportunities for you to get valuable feedback from your peers and educators. On top of these teaching events, you may go on a fieldtrip to gather research about a brief, undertake group work around a specific brief, work independently under supervision in the studio, and put up an exhibition to pick-up key presentation skills.

The course recognizes the importance of technical skills, and places focus on adaptability to new technologies. Technical skills instruction sessions are taught regularly and act as tasters. This allows you to explore and become acquainted with a wide spectrum of industry standard software, and places specialization and deeper investigation of specific tools in your hands. This reinforces the course’s overall approach to technical skills: although undeniably important, in the current climate where industry standard software is publicly accessible and relatively easy to pick-up even by non-designers, software skills take a secondary place in the delivery of the curriculum, which places conceptual innovation and appropriateness first.

All taught content is carefully developed around your module briefs and in support of your response to these. Sessions are facilitated both within a studio environment and online. We place a keen focus on experimentation, play and critical thinking, and our teaching staff will encourage and prompt you in these directions. We value the importance of multiple voices and we regularly invite guest speakers and industry experts to supplement our teaching, with recent visitors including Craig Oldham, JKR’s Joe Hall, Sarah Coleman and Coventry University alumni Tobias Hall and Rob Wilde. You may also have the opportunity to visit galleries in this country, such as the V&A, Ikon, Herbert, National Gallery, Photography Gallery or, Design Museum, or take part in industry trips to Birmingham and London (subject to availability and additional costs may apply).

You are invited to take ownership of your own development and therefore we offer a range of extra workshops you can sign up for with an aim to enrich your skills in things like photography, print-making, 3D and digital media. In coming to Coventry University, you not only join a community of dedicated educators, but also one of inspiring peers. We try to facilitate meaningful exchange between all students through regular joint classes and course-wide social events (including Halloween and Christmas parties, and exhibition launches).

This course will be assessed using a variety of methods aimed both at the evaluation of acquired skills and learning specific to each module. This course is predominantly assessed by coursework; however assessment methods vary and depend on the module content and scope and may include, a portfolio of work, essays, presentations, exhibitions, reflective blogs and research and development documents.  The choice of assessment methods seeks to prepare you for the diverse contexts in which your design work may exist. Through the assessment process, you will therefore acquire key presentation skills.

The Coventry University Group assessment strategy ensures that our courses are fairly assessed and allows us to monitor student progression towards the achieving the intended learning outcomes. Assessments may include exams, individual assignments or group work elements.