MA Graphic Communication Design

MA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins 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.

Course structure
The course is delivered over two three-term academic years.

Unit one: Methods
In unit one you will challenge conventional notions of research by exploring how the media, methods, and skills of graphic communication design practice can be used to enquire, to interrogate, or to speculate new forms of knowledge. Guided by studio briefs set by tutors, you will initiate a series of iterative and process-led experiments. These experiments will develop your understanding of, and capacity to engage in, open-ended enquiry through making. In lieu of singular and closed outcomes, each of your projects will grow through systematic engagement in a method. 

Unit two: Methods, Positions
In unit two you will explore how positions arise through, or are inherent in, experimentation with methods and media. You will situate yourself within the discipline of graphic design, such as in context of a medium, production process, or mode of distribution. You will also explore how graphic design frames your engagement with broader contexts, such as social and environmental conditions, institutions, markets, technologies, other fields of study, etc.

Your coursework will develop through continued iterative and process-led experimentation, and by critically contextualising your practice through reading, writing, and association. This will enable you to explore how a research practice articulates, enacts, and publishes (makes public) new forms of knowledge through and about graphic design.

Unit three: Methods, Positions, Projections
In unit three you will project your research practice into new territory through a more critical interrogation of the relationship between the form of a message, its medium, and its context. Building on your iterative, experimental, and process-led work from previous units, you will consider how engaging with the details of production opens more possibilities for your work.

You will also consider how projections, as acts of publication, distribution, and/or circulation, are relational and contextual. You will explore how your practice develops though its interaction with networks, publics, and audiences.

Open days
Our next online open day is on Friday May 13 at 12–1pm (BST). Book your place. 

Application
Applicants are welcome from within the fields of graphic and communication design, as well as from other academic backgrounds (humanities, social sciences, engineering, etc.).

Applications are reviewed until the course is full. Your application will only be considered after you have successfully completed an online application, submitted the required documents, and uploaded a digital portfolio.

A note to applicants from the US: University of the Arts London participates in US federal student aid programs, so US applicants may be eligible for federal loans to help cover the cost of study.

Start date: September 2022.
Course length and mode of study: Two years extended full-time (60 weeks).

Devised in collaboration with students, extended full-time is a study mode which sits between full-time and part-time. It allows students to maintain a balance between the competing demands of contemporary life and the pace of postgraduate study in an arts and design college.