BA Honours Graphic Design

From the design of traditional advertising and branding to website design and motion graphics, our BA Honours Graphic Design programme encourages you to explore and extend your creativity whilst equipping you with the necessary technical skills to physically realise your work. We’ll encourage you to actively explore how to visually communicate ideas creatively, inventively and effectively. The course was initiated in 2017, and has very quickly established itself as one of the leading programmes in Graphic Design in the MENA region.

Entry onto this course requires a portfolio.

Why Study BA Honours Graphic Design at Middlesex University Dubai?

Our BA Honours Graphic Design degree educates, inspires and prepares our graduates to be the creative designers of the future. The course has been developed to embrace contemporary changes in the creative industries, and is built on a formidable tradition of creative exploration and design education developed at our London campus. We offer challenging, enjoyable projects with wide ranging outcomes and the exploratory nature of the course will encourage you to challenge the boundaries of graphic design practice itself. You will have the freedom to eventually develop your own distinctive creative voice, guided by an enthusiastic staff team and supported by fantastic facilities.

Throughout the course, we focus on teaching you about communicating ideas and information through exciting problem solving projects in branding, magazine/editorial design, typography, advertising, packaging, exhibition design, editorial photography and art direction, moving image and digital media. You will explore conceptual thinking, media and print processes, industry standard computer software applications and understand how to use graphic design to present an argument, inform or persuade your target audience and solve visual communication problems to a professional standard.

Our students on this programme in London are identified by leading design organisations such as D&AD, RSA and ISTD as among the best graduates nationally, winning numerous awards and achieving regularly at international student assessment schemes. Graduates of this course in the UK have gone on to work for design consultants, advertising agencies and media providers all over the world.

Our graphics students contributed to Middlesex University Dubai winning University of the Year 2019 at the Dubai Lynx Festival of Creativity, an award not just for the UAE, but for the entire MENA region.

“Our first programme from Middlesex University’s prestigious School of Art and Design to be offered at the Dubai campus.

Programme Content

What will you study on the Graphic Design degree at Middlesex University?

Year 1

During first year, you will be introduced to what the discipline actually entails: you’ll begin to understand the diversity of the study area, and the breadth of approaches to exploring and solving graphic design problems. You will discover how to employ visual and theoretical research, lateral thinking and visual and verbal communication skills as sound working methods, using logical and creative approaches to solve graphic design problems. You will discover the creative and communicative potential of typography, and the breadth and diversity of historical and contemporary practice in graphic design. Exploring a variety of different graphic media, you will be encouraged to develop an inventive and experimental response to the use of processes and materials in workshop areas including photography, printmaking, typography, design thinking and digital and analogue illustration.

Year 2

The focus shifts in your second year to creative problem solving in the context of discipline specifics, utilising your understanding of the creative process to make design work worth spending time with. The projects will enable you to investigate the potential of concept, format and structure, analysing complex information to come up with highly imaginative and creative visual communication solutions. An understanding of specialist subject areas of contemporary creative practice is developed through studio and workshop based activities, enabling students to develop individual approaches to solving visual communication problems with the acquisition of intermediate specialist skills in creative workshop areas such as advertising, magazine design, moving image, interactive/web design, packaging and external client projects. Students are expected to undertake a two week design internship at the end of semester two, and regularly engage with external clients in order to gain further experience of the design industry, client briefing and liaison and creating work for specific target audiences.

Year 3

For your final year of study, you will concentrate on solving visual communications problems to a professional standard, drawing on two years of highly developed creative intelligence and design skills to make a portfolio of work that best represents the individual designer. There will be opportunities for students to participate in student award competitions and assessment schemes; extend their range of specialist skills in graphic design and visual communications projects; pursue creative problem solving projects that are self-directed and geared towards making you a visually distinctive visual communicator. You will be expected to develop an individual, highly informed graphic design methodology that demonstrates your creative, critical and technical abilities to their fullest extent. Throughout the year your knowledge and skills will be deepened and extended through a range of project briefs that include branding, publishing, advertising, interactive media, creative industry competitions and a mandatory major self-initiated project. Students will participate in an end of year exhibition that showcases their work to an audience of University stakeholders, industry professionals and the general public.