Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Visual Communication

at Arts University Bournemouth United Kingdom

This degree will help you to prepare for professional practice (part 1 ARB/RIBA) and investigate the ways we live in the world through material and spatial relationships. You'll develop skills that will form the foundation of your career in architecture: making, collaborating, designing and communicating. Integrating practice with theory is at the heart of professional architectural practice, so that’s exactly what you’ll do here.

You’ll explore, experiment and develop new solutions. Discussing and presenting your work you'll share ideas about architecture through making tangible propositions, mindful of how they might be realised.

This ‘research-by-making’ approach encourages risk-taking, innovation and entrepreneurship. Both inside and outside of the studio, as well as in regular seminars, lectures and reviews, you’ll work on projects that require a creative balance of rigour and risk, informed by your design, technical and contextual knowledge.

At every stage in your degree, you’ll have opportunities to build on your own practice through collaborations with other courses. You’ll develop an understanding of the practice and theory of architecture, grounded in making, along with critical thinking and a familiarity with the material nature of architectural ideas. You’ll explore the practice of making thoughtful, tangible, inhabited places that mediate between the individual, the world we live in, and the others we live with.

MA Illustration will appeal to you if you’re open to participating in a broad range of creative strategies, utilising traditional and digital methods.

These include drawing and printmaking, lens and time-based media, with ideas and concepts that might be realised through exhibition, publication or exciting new hybrid forms.

Students studying on the course come from a number of diverse backgrounds including Illustration, Graphic Design, Printmaking, Drawing, Photography and Painting. Others come from outside of art and design, having had experience across other subject disciplines, but demonstrating a passion for illustration.

MA Illustration is structured and delivered in order to encourage and support you in developing your own distinct visual language, recognising an expansive understanding of contemporary illustration through the exploration of relationships between illustrator as author, audience and context.

Ideas are developed through specific individual approaches to research into practice and reflective enquiry. This deeper understanding and commitment to practice assists students in identifying, exploring and achieving your future career aspirations. The course encourages you to engage imaginatively with illustration, in relation to both the academic subject and practice of illustration.

MA Illustration encourages you to question the nature of your practice and its context and position relative to the creative industries. The course encourages you to engage imaginatively with your practice in relation to the evolving academic subject and practice of illustration. Your practice will be considered in a global context, with an awareness of the emergence of new and innovative approaches that interrogate, challenge and advance traditional. As a graduate from MA Illustration, you’ll be able to carve your own niche in an evolving market for visual materials.

Painting defines its practice through the particularities of the painted field. The making materiality of the unique object, a globally acknowledged cultural history and the dedicated and dynamic relationship of the painted object to the painter. Painting in the 21st century is vital and relevant. Contemporary painting and what it can be, do and declare is meaningful. We ask how, why and according to what means.

The MA Painting course will explore this innovative and expansive territory in depth, dedicating itself to specialist study at postgraduate level.

Visual Communication combines skills in illustration, graphic design, typography and digital design to create images that persuade or inform.

From the start, the course focuses on hand-drawn imagery to develop a feel for the shapes and styles that connect with audiences. Practical experiences will be used to develop your skills. We’ll help you to build your visual awareness and understanding of the world around you. In addition to plenty of theory and debate, you’ll have the chance to work on live briefs with other students and find work placements in creative businesses.

Visual Communication underlines the importance of good ideas. You’ll leave with all the practical skills that you need to work in a vibrant and exciting industry. Our graduates work as freelancers in small design companies and with larger firms, both locally and internationally.

On this course you’ll learn practical, professional and entrepreneurial skills that equip you to work as part of a team, or even set up your own business in textiles.

You’ll study textiles in its widest sense and learn many skills, from print, stitch embellishment to dyeing and mixed media construction. You’ll have the opportunity to focus on a variety of specialist areas, including textiles for fashion, textiles for interiors and textiles as design/crafts.

Traditional skills are taught together with expertise in modern design development, production, and contemporary invention. Whether you go on to work for a retail brand, or an international design house, we will prepare you for the challenges that the creative textile industry holds.

We've also formed an AUB textiles Agency to promote student work at Premier Vision Paris and London Print Textile Trade Fairs. Students have engaged with industry – experiencing how the business buys and sells textiles.

You'll learn the skills needed to take on key creative and production roles in both live-action drama productions and documentaries.

Creating any sort of film depends on a team of technically gifted individuals working together. You'll discover the relationship between the various roles and stages of film production, including designing, editing, sound, cinematography, production and direction. As a film student at AUB, you'll have access to state-of-the-art equipment and well-equipped studios. We have professional filmmaking equipment for each part of the process, from pre-production to the delivery of completed films.

We’ve recently been awarded Gold by the TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework) which assesses the quality of teaching. Our staff are exceptional.

Our staff are inspiring teachers, researchers, industry practitioners and technicians who are here to support you with your studies and help you to achieve outstanding outcomes.

On this course, you’ll gain practical skills and explore the thinking behind fashion branding and communication. You’ll create image and film, and develop visual identities using the latest creative software. We’ll also teach you the theory behind everything from creating a narrative for an image to building a global brand identity.

Great fashion communication comes about through collaboration. In AUB’s creative community, you’ll have the chance to do just that. You’ll be introduced to, and work with, students on other BA (Hons) courses, including Fashion, Commercial Photography, Textiles, Film Production and Make-up for Media and Performance, so the opportunities are limitless to apply your skills and collaborate.

According to the British Fashion Council, the UK Fashion Industry supports 797,000 jobs. With a degree from AUB, you will also make your own unique mark in this exciting space.

We’ve recently been awarded Gold by the TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework).

Our teaching staff are exceptional. They're inspiring teachers, industry practitioners, technicians and researchers who are here to support you with your studies and help you to achieve outstanding outcomes.

Our course is designed to develop your individual pathway into this burgeoning sector of the creative and cultural industries. Events don’t just happen. Festivals, celebrations, exhibitions, pop-up events and multi-media events need creative, energetic and well-organised people to make them a reality. On this course, you’ll develop the skills and knowledge to conceive, plan and manage successful creative events.

Events are the product of teamwork involving people from a wide range of backgrounds and interests working together. A unique aspect of this course is that you’ll work with fellow students each year to devise and deliver a live event. You’ll discover and develop your own specialist interests and have the satisfaction of seeing the events you organise go ‘live’ in front of an audience.

Our work placement unit in the second year allows you to put these skills into practice in an industry setting. You’ll be surrounded by a wealth of creative talent and will have the opportunity to work with creative practitioners and external clients in the events world.

You’ll also learn how the events industry operates, and will develop skills in digital technology and business planning. Our graduates have gone on to use their skills in organisation, management, and marketing in festival production companies and in many of the top digital businesses, such as Spotify. They also work in multi-platform marketing and events companies, fashion businesses, world-class museums, and leading charities. Through theory, technique and practice, we’ll help you to develop as a successful creative events manager, with plenty to offer the arts and creative industries.

Since the Harry Potter boom in the early 2000s, alongside a recent influx of new releases from studies, such as Disney and Marvel, the film and VFX industry has expanded at an exponential rate.

This has firmly established the UK as the leading country for high-quality Visual Effects work and created an unprecedented demand for fresh, highly-trained graduate talent from the UK education system. The course was created in response to an industry demand for visual effects artists who possess strong observational skills and the ability to apply them collaboratively in the workplace.

Designed from the ground up by industry professionals, specifically to address this demand, the primary ethos is to create the quality required for employability within the industry. Developing a foundation in traditional artistic techniques, such as drawing, colour theory, perspective, photography and composition, 125 you will learn what it takes to create your own feature film quality visual effects.

Our 2D workflow uses Nuke for all compositing, and Maya/Zbrush and Arnold for 3D, while our colour pipeline is based on an industry model with custom LUTs to ensure accurate monitoring of colour in our fully calibrated VFX labs. All of our VFX labs are equipped with top of the range industry-level workstations and are supported by our render farm, fibre network, and clustered storage. With smaller class sizes, students have full access to the VFX labs and workstations on specified lab days alongside a more personal, teaching approach. You will experience a team-based production process that replicates industry best practice; including previsualisation, concept development, on-set data acquisition, asset building, and compositing. We’ll introduce you to the underlying concepts and fundamental principles of Visual Effects work and teach you the necessary creative and technological disciplines, developing your knowledge of 2D and 3D software.

The course prides itself on the currency of its staff. You will be taught by industry professionals that between them have worked at studios, including ILM, Framestore, Double Negative, Electronic Arts, MPC, Image Engine, Weta Digital and many more. We have taken the knowledge gained at these studios and have brought it into the classroom. Having worked in the industry at the highest levels, we not only know what makes a strong artist, but also what the visual effects industry is looking for. We are focused on our graduates’ successful entry into the VFX industry, as well as them having a long and successful career.

The visual effects industry community is very close, much like a family where everyone knows each other. Through the personal connections of our industry experienced staff we are able to bring in top class guest speakers, such as Christian Manz, Creative Director, Film at Framestore and Sue Lyster, Director of Studio Operations, and ILM, to name a few recent guests.

Animation’s position as an interdisciplinary field that draws from Art and Design, Film, Computing, Fine Art, Graphics (and other areas besides) necessarily means that top-level graduates in the field will have mastered a cross-disciplinary understanding of a range of skills, techniques, theories and discourses.

The overriding objective is to enable all MA Animation Production students to see themselves as part of a ‘community of practice’ (that includes research and critique, and the building of a ‘production culture’), existing not as atomised students ‘doing their own thing’, but as part of a meaningful whole.

You’ll be a BA graduate in Animation or a related discipline. Although we will consider good graduates from other disciplines – having accepted them from Costume, Graphics, Digital Media, Illustration, Modelmaking, Photography and Fine Art in the past – you must have some understanding of the animation production process to prosper on this course.

Our alumni have gone on to work at Aardman, ILM, Lupus Films, Framestore, Pixar, Moving Picture Company and many other companies. We’re proud of the network of AUB graduates who are now employed in animation – many of whom return to talk to current students.