👵🏼 Parsons' Communication Design program is the oldest graphic and communication design program in the United States. It has also consistently been the most technologically forward, internationally diverse, and future-facing program of its kind.
📖 🕸📺 🤳🏼🔮 Communication Design is the practice of planning and projecting human experiences with visual and written content. This content can be for any purpose: commercial, educational, political, or spiritual. It can also take any form: in print, on the web, or in motion on a screen.
🤯 💡Communication Design is design, just like product design or architecture. It’s not “illustration that makes money” or “business that’s creative.” Design involves research, ideation, prototyping, iteration, and presentation. This is woven through the core curriculum.
🦠 🐙 Most good communication design experiences are visual systems that give form to content across different kinds of media. For example, a contemporary magazine usually also has a website where most people read it, and brand campaigns connect what’s on billboards with what you see on your phone. If you just want to make one thing, you’re probably not going to like communication design.
💻📱⚗️Because the internet is a central part of our experience of content today, interaction design is built into the core curriculum at Parsons. Every student learns how to code at a basic level, and then goes on to create projects that live online and that work on desktop and mobile screens.
ℬ ℌ ⑂ The other big core foundation for Communication Design is typography. Typography means thinking deeply about how words appear visually, in themselves, in relationship to each other, and in relationship to the meaning of what they represent.
👩🏻🎓👩🏼🎓👨🏽🎓 “Core curriculum” means “classes you have to take in order to get a BFA in Communication Design.” Classes are also designed so that what you learn in one class is what you build on in the next class, so you have to take them in order. Required studio classes make up less than half of the 120-credit BFA curriculum, and the more fixed they are, the more it frees you up to explore your interests in your other classes as much as you want.
✺ 🐡 🌞There are a lot of different roles that designers can occupy over the course of their careers, including working independently or in a studio. Our goal is to prepare you so that in a few years after graduation, you can rise to design director positions in areas that matter to you. This usually means being specific about what matters to you, but being general in your skills and knowledge within the field of design.