Focus of the

Digital Art & Design Program

The Digital Art and Design program is currently focused on the following areas:

Graphic Development and Illustration
This is our program history, and provides the glue that holds our program together. Our related industries are long on computer operators and formatters and short on people with graphic development skills. This also includes the broader skills that are critical in any communication media: design, layout, and typography. Conceptually, this involves the communications process and the connection between the client and the target audience the message, and how best to deliver it, or even whether to deliver it. This is the kernel of problem solving in the communications fields. It is the core foundation courses and the abilities that our graduates develop that have made them so popular with employers.

Desktop Publishing, Digital Prepress and Print-based Communication
The "Desktop Publishing Revolution" has opened numerous avenues of employment for DAAD graduates. Desktop Publishing brought the convergence of a number of traditionally disparate, but related skills such as design, graphic development, typesetting, layout, prepress, photography, proofing and client contact. The Digital Art & Design programs emphasis on graphic development, graphic design and visual problem solving provides a very unique approach to the fields related to desktop publishing. This approach has proven to be very popular with employers who encounter quite a few individuals with strong backgrounds in either layout or computer operation, but very few with illustrative, design and visual problem-solving skills.

Multimedia
There is much confusion surrounding the term multimedia. It essentially means using combinations of different media, still graphics, still photography, animation, video and sound to communicate. This definition has evolved to include the idea of interactivity, the user rather than the designer chooses the pace and pathways through information. The related concept of a publication being different in context and juxtaposition for each user comes into play.

We think of multimedia projects as being delivered primarily on CDROM, and to an increasing degree over the internet and intranets. These projects typically involve animation, desktop level video and sound, text and still graphics and photography. This necessitates new forms of design based on the concept of hypertext and hypermedia, and the presumption that a given user won't necessarily read an article or encounter information from start to finish, but will jump to related concepts based on their own informational needs.

This plays out in our program in a number of ways. First, the idea of information design, clients tend to develop their content or source material in a sequential manner. This information usually needs to be redesigned, or repurposed, for non-linear access. Second, is the idea of interaction design: how does the user access and interact with the information? Critical in multimedia is the idea of user interface development the controls and accesses, the menus and buttons, the metaphors and image maps that orient users to the material and guide them through it. In multimedia the ideas of development and invention come strongly into play.

The differences between multimedia and web publishing have just about disappeared. The only real difference is delivery format. Our program advisory committee has indicated that multimedia as we have known it for the last decade will probably merge completely with the field of online publishing in the next few years. We have developed a two-course treatment of the technical and practical issues of these fields along with courses in content development and information design, client contact and project management.

Online Publishing
This is probably the most rapidly growing area of our field, and the one that holds the most profound changes in the way our society communicates. A recent television documentary on the explosive growth of the internet explored the idea that an increase in the number and rate of communication transactions in the lives of heavy internet users has the effect of compressing time. It postulated that heavy internet users engage in as many communications transactions in one year as a non-internet user might in seven years.

This compression of time carries across to many other areas of life including product development cycles, communications theory, and the way organizations and the work world are organized.

In our program the web is a natural outlet and market for student employment. In addition to some of the technical and conceptual issues already discussed above in multimedia, online publishing has a few unique requirements. Documents that are published online are very rarely completed in the traditional sense. The most successful online documents continue to evolve, sometimes daily, hourly or even continuously. Where before we might read a great book on the advancements in a particular field that was current to within about one year, or read a magazine that was current to within two or three months, we now can find out what happened yesterday, or indeed what is currently happening today.

This has far reaching implications for how clients communicate with their target markets, and provides another strong direction for our program. As indicated above, we will treat the technical and practical aspects of online publishing and multimedia in an introductory/intermediate course pairing, and complement it with courses in content development and information design, and client contact and project management.

Web Animation
For some time an introduction to animation has been part of our program. What we accomplish is an introduction to animation, and that is often enough for students to gain employment in the field. This is usually due to a strong student interest and a great deal of self-directed study. In the last couple of years, however, there have been a number of evolutions on the animation front that have renewed its role in our program. Our Program Advisory Committee has advised that we confine our animation activities in the program to "desktop level animation" and its role in world wide web and multimedia development. We continue to offer treatment of the principles and applications of animation in this context using leading web-oriented animation software.