Illustration

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The MA Illustration course encourages practitioners to recognize and explore a distinct range of approaches to visual communication, motivating a highly personal understanding of their practice and an individual approach to observing, recording and visualising the stories of our complex culture and society.

Within dedicated studios, you will experience a broad scope of illustrative practice exploiting the full vocabulary of traditional and digital technologies, capturing meaning, constructing opinion and reacting through image making.

These student-focused environments are lead by a dedicated team of creatives including Bruce Ingman, - winner of the prestigious Mother Goose Award for the best newcomer to children's book illustration in the UK as well as the V&A Illustration Award and supported by commercial illustrators such as Laura Carlin the Quentin Blake Prize winner two years in a row, illustrator of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.

The course accommodates a diverse range of creative approaches and provokes a personal, imaginative and reflective understanding of the signs and meanings of visual language, intellectually and practically.

You will have the opportunity to develop your personal approach whilst working on real-world creative briefs set by professional design bodies and enter relevant professional competitions. There is a strong emphasis on helping you to understand your work in its given context and to fully explore its relationship with a given audience.

The course is based in the School of Design at The Cass, a highly respected Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design. Within the faculty is Cassworks, a new resource centre for product development that contains advanced manufacturing technology, all students are encouraged to consider the use of both traditional and advanced technologies.

You will be given the opportunity to experiment and develop skills through technical inductions in facilities including well-appointed computer suites, a letterpress and a screen printing studio.

Career opportunities
On completion of the course you will be equipped with the skills and attributes required to succeed in the complex and diversified world of Illustration.

Career destinations include: freelance/commission-based illustrators, publishing, editorial work, graphic design, advertising, web-design, authorship, film and theatre.

The course provides a multi-disciplinary practice environment, which promotes opportunities within a wider area of design and the visual communication industries.

Course Structure
The course structure comprises a range of modules, but the main vehicle for learning is a series of projects, often with external partners, that change annually. Projects are undertaken within one of a number of design studios that set a theme for the design work over the academic year, very like a commercial practice.

Each studio runs a number of projects, which offer you a choice of an extraordinary range of research interests, product types, materials, processes, and cultural and theoretical contexts. Each studio is lead by an experienced designer/tutor who sets a specific agenda. They all share a commitment to contemporary design and its global and local contexts, a passion for the broad sweep of current art and design thinking, and a desire to test the premises of what illustration is, or can be, in the 21stCentury both practically and theoretically.

Students completing the MA undertake a substantial personal project based upon their design and research project work in the design studio, or emerging from one of the thematic areas or a combination of fields.

You will select an area of study, undertake appropriate research, develop your work through investigative processes, formulate your own argument or theoretical position, and produce an independent and coherent body of work.

The major project challenges you to sustain a substantial and serious study of a topic or field of interest which will test your creative ambition through your control of its direction and substance within a framework of critical reflection, supported by and measured against an established area of scholarship.

Assessment
You are supported through a 'laboratory' model of learning; developing innovative design, conceptual thinking, professional understanding and aesthetic sensitivity. Throughout the course, you will develop, present and exhibit your portfolio of research and design work for critique, feedback and assessment.

Facilities
The course is based in the School of Design at The Cass, a highly respected faculty of Art, Architecture and Design. Within the Faculty is Cassworks, a new resource centre for product development that contains advanced manufacturing technology.

This includes: CAD studios running Rhino, Autocad, Studio Max, and advanced manufacturing such as rapid prototyping (SLS, 3D print), water-jet cutting, 5-axis CNC milling, laser cutting and 3D scanning. We also have a huge range of traditional equipment, some now quite rare. You will be given the opportunity to experiment and develop skills through technical inductions.