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MA - Master of Arts
Arts University Bournemouth
Full Time
Sep 2026
12 Month
MA Graphic Design encourages designers to explore ways of developing understanding between co-communicators. This course approaches all forms of graphic design as triggers for thinking and feeling. By interrogating your practice at the cognitive level, you’ll explore how such things as a metaphor, and the framing and blending of ideas, drive communication. Through self-initiated research and experimentation, you’ll be encouraged to engage with the world, and find insights that generate understanding and guide positive action. 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). Students may have studied photography, architecture, illustration, interaction design, three-dimensional design, fine art, or, subjects such as journalism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology or sociology. Whatever your background, you’ll 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 from which to further develop. Your practice can take many forms: it can be self-expressive, or socially orientated; print, screen-based or three-dimensional.
The final 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. Throughout the course, you?ll produce a Contextual Journal providing a means to gather evidence in support of your career aspirations and as a way of documenting your practice.
This unit seeks to identify and critically review the attitudes and understanding underlying your graphic design practice. It begins with a critique of conventional understanding of the communication process. It introduces theories from the cognitive humanities, such as frame theory, primary metaphor theory, and conceptual metaphor theory and applies these to your practice through a number of assignments. You will be encouraged to return, through practice, to an engagement with the fundamental elements and language of graphic design.
This unit marks a shift from a predominantly taught, toward a supervisory, mode of study. You?ll engage in experimentation and primary and secondary research around a focus of study that you will define in consultation with the course team. 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.
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