Environment & Coursework
During your Pre-College Design Program, you’ll attend morning and afternoon classes, Monday through Friday. You’ll work in our beautiful, spacious studios in the historic Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall.
Your instructor to student ratio will be about 1:13, promoting opportunities for questions and feedback. Although Pre-College projects are different, the goals that shape your learning experience are very similar to the first year of our regular undergraduate design program.
At the end of the program, each student meets with a faculty member to discuss his/her performance in the program. We use the last week of the program to help you address questions you might have regarding your portfolio, teaching you techniques for documenting and presenting your work. The program concludes on a celebratory note, inviting parents and friends to an open-studio forum to see the great work that you produced over the course of the six-week period.
Design Experiences
Through the Pre-College Design experience, you’ll:
- Work in a supportive atmosphere, tackling projects that are culturally relevant and stimulate your own interests. Critiques provide constructive feedback to help hone your skills. You’ll gain exposure to several working methods and schools of thought that are shared across design disciplines, yet you’ll begin to build proficiencies in key areas.
- Experience graphic design: in the graphic communications sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of visual communication, with an emphasis on developing strong formal and fundamental concepts inherent in 2/D, 3/D and 4/D design. Topics such as typography, shape, color, visual hierarchy, composition, image relationships and interaction are addressed throughout the studio assignments. Previous projects have included explorations in book design, poster series, public signage and Web sites.
- Experience Industrial Design: In the industrial design sessions you have the opportunity to experience the thinking, processes and issues that face today’s product developers. We work on building the visualization, modeling and concept development skills that designers use to bring us the products and services of everyday life. These experiences provide an exposure to what it’s like to be a college student studying industrial design.
