Course summary

Our degree courses with Foundation year offer the opportunity to prepare you for advanced study before you progress onto a full honours degree at the University of Westminster.

Whether you do not feel ready for degree-level study, don’t have the right qualifications, want to change your subject specialism or return to study after an absence from education, we aim to encourage a broad range of students to undertake our Foundation year in order to progress onto their full honours degree with us.

Our Foundation year in Art and Design is designed to provide you with an introduction to our range of subject areas, and to prepare you for the discipline of your choice. It will give you the opportunity to explore new ideas, opening up new perspectives on the key debates within the field. It begins in the first semester with the development of fundamental Art and Design skills, as well as practical exploration across all of the disciplines in our Art and Design Foundation programme. In the second semester you are encouraged to specialise in your own discipline and are supported at this stage by tutors from your host course. You will also benefit from workshops in our high-end facilities, and from working with leading academics who will encourage you to become a confident and creative thinker. Your practical development is accompanied by modules in both semesters on foundational academic skills – skills that will be essential as you progress to your chosen full degree.

On successful completion of the Foundation year, you'll be able to move on to study for the Graphic Design BA Honours degree over a further three years study.

The Graphic Design BA aims to provide an intellectual and creative space for you to explore and develop a wide range of skills and understanding around the discipline of graphic design. This is applied through a variety of current and emerging technologies and processes for visual communication. The evolving and fluid forms of published and experiential exchanges include interactions with audiences and users across digital, physical, and virtual environments.

The breadth and range of the facilities and processes available support creative learning that is interdisciplinary, collaborative and professional – embracing technologies and practices found in current industry work environments.

This course offers a flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-faceted approach to the study of contemporary graphic design practice across a broad range of contexts and projects that are industry facing as well as experimental, discipline critical and research led. It will prepare you with the highest level of practical and employable skills, knowledge and visual understanding required to both work and lead in this sector of the creative industry today.

Study and learning on the course are encouraging, inclusive and supportive, fostering your aptitudes and individual expression in the work you produce while offering wide and in-depth visual inquiry and experimentation.

Throughout the course, there is a wide range of optional choice modules that support individualised creative agility, enabling you to be flexible and resilient, while also making you industry ready to adapt your practice rapidly within evolving employments, periods of change, new and emerging communication and societal driven exchanges and technologies.

The course fosters the development of employability skills and knowledge as well as work-based learning opportunities from your first year through to the final stages of the course. Two options reinforce and augment this ethos: either a year-long, professional placement or internship nationally or a year overseas in either an academic or work environment.

The course has a strong professional focus and connections in conjunction with the University’s award-winning Westminster Enterprise Network, supporting all aspects of employability, from training, professional practice, self-promotion, work experience, interviewing and job opportunities.

You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside colleagues in generous studio spaces with excellent facilities for a range of digital technologies with access to facilities for working in more traditional media and processes. Key aspects of learning include UX (User eXperience design), visual effects, prototyping, AR (Augmented Reality), MR (Mixed Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality), branding and digital arts. You will also have access to analogue-making processes through the facility centres in printmaking, photography, three-dimensional fabrication and digital printing.

Within your learning, you will be able to develop your awareness and understanding of the social contexts and environmental responsibilities of design, so that you can identify communication strategies that will enrich society and people's lives by enabling them to be better informed about the world in which we all live in and share.

You'll learn to engage audiences through imaginative and creative design solutions that may challenge, persuade, shock, provoke, excite and entertain, but always inform. You'll also develop the transferable and cognitive skills necessary for lifelong personal and professional development.

Alumni and specialists from the industry contribute to the teaching programme alongside our dedicated course team of experienced professional creatives and researchers.

Based at the generous green-field site of Harrow campus, a recognised creative hothouse for Arts and Media, you’ll be joining a diverse and inclusive community of staff and students, studying subjects that include fashion, film, fine art, film, photography, music, animation, journalism and advertising. The scale and scope of Westminster mean you’ll also have access to all central London campuses in Regent Street, Marylebone and Cavendish Campuses.