Course Descriptions

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Illustration Capstone and Portfolio Review

A portfolio project and portfolio review for Illustration majors

The Illustration Capstone and Portfolio Review class offers an opportunity to develop a multifaceted portfolio piece and hone your creative work into a polished presentation for future clients and employers.

The Illustration Capstone Project provides students the opportunity to complete a multidimensional illustration project in three stages, working closely with a department head. A children's book publishing and promotion project will challenge students to demonstrate their proficiency in key aspects of the Illustration program.

Students participate in Portfolio Review in weeks 9-15 of the semester. This provides students the opportunity to gather and develop a portfolio of work and present it to faculty and classmates for feedback.

Illustrator I

Unleash the power of the industry-standard vector drawing tool for print and the Web

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful and versatile tool for creating illustrations, logos, and graphics for print and the web. You can learn to produce detailed and scalable art in this online Illustrator course. Working with an expert instructor, you'll build a strong foundation, exploring shape tools, drawing tools, layers, the Pen tool (a lesson unto itself) as well as transformations/distortions, type tools, and modifying paths and shapes. Hands-on illustration projects include creating a robot, a series of album covers, a marketing postcard, an advertisement vehicle wrap, and a company logo.

Illustrator II

Expand your Adobe Illustrator skills in challenging projects

Adobe Illustrator puts any conceivable vector art objective at your fingertips. But most digital designers only scratch the surface of Illustrator. To make a splash, one must delve deeper. In this advanced online Illustrator course, you'll create photo-realistic illustrations, complex patterns, rich designs, and learn how to accelerate your efforts with helpful workflow features. Working with an expert instructor, build on your existing Illustrator skills and tackle high-end projects with depth, dimension, and wow-power.

InDesign I

Learn the ins and outs of the industry-standard page layout program

Layout designers today need the skills to move seamlessly between print and digital projects. Luckily, Adobe InDesign can handle it all. In this online InDesign course, you’ll explore a host of essential InDesign techniques and focus on developing efficient workflows. The course will impart a working knowledge of InDesign's main capabilities, everything from basic features to using parent pages, importing and manipulating objects, controlling text flow and style, and organizing content with tables, layers, links, and conveyor tools. Projects give you training in a range of real world print/digital publishing projects, from brochures to catalogs, magazines to ePubs, and even an interactive folio for the iPad.

Intro to Drawing

Workshop on basic drawing techniques

Think drawing is a gift that has to come naturally? Drawing is a skill that can be developed with practice. In this online beginner drawing course, you'll learn how to draw with proper techniques, discovering how to represent what you see through studies in contour drawing, perspective, positive/negative space, and value. With feedback from an expert instructor, you will improve your drawing and develop a deeper understanding of any subject you are trying to capture as an artist or designer.

Intro to Marketing

Fundamental concepts in marketing design

Today's business clients are looking for designers who can apply their creative talents in ways that enhance strategic business goals. In this online introductory Marketing Design course, you'll learn tried-and-true marketing concepts and explore how they affect the design process. You'll gain a solid grasp of the marketing process, understand key terms and concepts that every marketer uses, and pick up smart questions to ask in client meetings.

Intro to Motion

Learn the fundamentals of animation

How does animation actually work? In this online introductory animation course, you'll learn the 12 essential principles of animation including squash and stretch, anticipation, and exaggeration. Working with a professional animator, you'll explore how fundamental concepts in physics and motion are used to create sophisticated, convincing motion art in sequential art, video, 2D animation, and 3D animation, and more. Practical projects include stop-motion and flipbook-style animation.

Intro to Visual Arts

Explore the purpose and process of art-making

What makes a painting work? What inspires a sculptor to create? Artists are influenced by the language of art and visual communication, historical and social forces, and the evolution of new modes of expression. In this online visual arts course, you'll deepen your art knowledge by exploring your own artistic creativity. You'll look at paintings, sculptures, experimental pieces, and more, learning to critique composition and decode their social or political purpose. Course projects include art themes and creating your own art pieces that demonstrate your grasp of course concepts in the medium of your choice.

JavaScript for Designers I

Learn how to write simple JavaScript programs from scratch.

Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, the programming language that allows you to make things happen when a user interacts with your website. You will learn how to create clean, valid code as you create programs that respond to various kinds of user interaction. Assignments include a range of projects: interactive dialogue boxes, a trivia quiz, a rainbow color picker, a sortable database, and more.

Landscape Photography

Unleash your nature photography skills

Landscape photography can be fascinating and endlessly inspiring, just like the natural world. In this course, you will explore a wide range of concepts and techniques to help you get more out of your nature photography. Each assignment will challenge you to go out and photograph the natural world, exploring compositional concepts and shooting techniques for different kinds of subjects and environments, ranging from macro and mobile to HDR and panoramic shots. To help you organize, edit, and showcase your work, the course will explore editing techniques using Adobe Lightroom. By the end of the course, you'll have created a stunning portfolio of images celebrating your favorite natural location(s).

Life Drawing I

Learn life drawing using classic techniques

Life drawing is a fundamental artistic challenge. Capturing the human figure in all its infinite, intricate variations requires both a mastery of technique and a thorough understanding of the body. In this online life drawing course, you'll make your figure drawings come to life with guidance with feedback from an expert instructor. Following traditional methods, you'll learn the standard measures and proportions artists use to achieve naturalistic and expressive figure drawings. The course builds progressively from the fundamentals to the challenges of portraiture, three-dimensional form, composition, and expression.

Life Drawing II

Tackle advanced topics in life drawing

Life drawing is an endless, fascinating challenge for an artist. In this online advanced life drawing course, you'll learn how to observe and capture the clothed human figure and explore basic techniques for all figure drawings. Working with a trained illustrator, you'll learn essential concepts in form, structure, and motion as you address subjects that interest and engage you. Discover the seven functions of the line, constructing scenes, and incorporating color.

Lightroom

Manage your photo workflow with Lightroom

Have you ever spent more time working on a photo shoot at your desk than you did taking the pictures? If so, consider managing, developing, printing, and presenting your images efficiently with Adobe Lightroom Classic. In this online Lightroom course, working with a photography pro, you'll learn how to import and catalog your images with ease, and use basic and advanced development and retouching tools to create stellar shots, taking advantage of advanced production techniques and workflows.

Logo Design I

A step-by-step process for logo design

Logos are the front line—the identity of a company. They are ubiquitous, and they are vital. In this introductory online logo design course, you'll learn how to design logos that will strengthen the visual image of your own or your client's company. Working with a design pro, you'll explore the development of logos through a series of case studies. Each exercise combines a written, conceptual component with hands-on projects for creating an effective logo.

Marketing Design

Create designs that communicate to consumers

Marketing designers have a daunting task: communicate with visuals and text in a way that entices consumers. Large corporations, small businesses, and non-profits alike require effective marketing design to promote their products and services. In this online marketing course, you'll make design decisions through research, writing, and planning techniques that set marketing designers (and their clients) apart from the competition. Each course lecture features real-life case studies as well as industry best practices for concept development, branding extensions, image-building, presentation, and even non-traditional marketing.

Narrative Photography

Advanced studies in photojournalism

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Readers and publishers expect photographers to be able to tell stories with images. In this online photojournalism course, you will explore how to utilize an editorial or narrative approach to photography. Throughout the course, you will use conceptualism in conjunction with documentary to build photo essays and other narrative projects. Studying with a respected photojournalist, you'll learn how to research, pitch, shoot, edit, and present a body of work that encompasses unifying themes.

Painting I

Master a traditional approach to painting

For centuries, artists have used paint to represent the physical world. Now you too can learn how to paint online. In this online painting course, you'll learn a traditional approach to oil painting or acrylic painting. Working with a professional artist, you'll study a time-honored approach to painting that enables you to capture proportion, perspective, and lighting in the world around you. You'll learn how to build a foundation with preparatory sketches and underpainting, find out how to mix your paints correctly, and gain control over value through monochromatic painting and color studies.

PHO 106: Photo Retouching

Perfect your images using Photoshop

Nearly every photograph can benefit from retouching, whether it's to correct subtle color problems or make major changes to the subject or background. In this online photo editing course, you'll learn how to turn good photographs into showstoppers. Using Photoshop's tools and filters, you'll learn to make seamless changes, realistically enhancing your images so that no one knows work was done. Photographers and designers will benefit from learning systematic professional routines taught in this course.

PHO 205: Lightroom

Learn to manage your creative photography workflow

Have you ever spent more time working on a photo shoot at your desk than you did taking the pictures? If so, consider managing, developing, printing, and presenting your images efficiently with Adobe Lightroom Classic. In this online Lightroom course, working with a photography pro, you'll learn how to import and catalog your images with ease, and use basic and advanced development and retouching tools to create stellar shots, taking advantage of advanced production techniques and workflows.

PHO 208: Color Correction

Correct and enhance image color using Photoshop

Do you know how to get the best out of your digital images? As every art director knows, even the best photographs (on the best of days) can be plagued by problems such as color casts, unnatural tones, dull highlights, murky shadows, or low contrast. In this online color correction course, you'll learn systematic techniques for every aspect of Photoshop color management using Photoshop. Working with a Photoshop guru, you'll learn how to identify classic color scenarios and use both comprehensive and quick-and-dirty methods for correcting them.