Electives
Advertising Design
Web Marketing
The Internet has changed the traditional marketing and media mix. Students study how the Web creates unique marketing and creative opportunities. Projects include development of strategic and creative solutions that utilize the web as the primary medium of message delivery. Only open to students with junior status or above.
Integrated Marketing
Through discussion, examples, and practical assignments, students explore how the combination of numerous forms of paid and nonpaid media effectively communicate a marketing strategy. Events, direct-response marketing (mail and television), promotions, out-of-home and public relations are explored. Only open to students with junior status or above.
Guerrilla Marketing
Consumers today know when they are being "advertised" to. Therefore, marketers and their agencies must invent alternative techniques and channels to communicate their messages in ways that fly under the radar. Students are exposed to and create advertising that doesn’t look like traditional advertising. They develop strategies and executions that reach consumers in radical unconventional and startling ways. Only open to students with junior status or above.
Corporate and Business To Business Advertising
This course focuses on the role of corporate advertising in creating or sustaining a positive public image and on the benefits of businesses communicating to other businesses for informational and promotional purposes. Only open to students with junior status or above.
Multicultural Marketing
This course focuses on creating advertising that addresses the increasing diversity in today’s markets. As the world changes and evolves, advertisers must know and be sensitive to the differences that make up our society today. Assignments include campaigns targeted to different cultures and lifestyles, including African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American and Gay and Lesbian. Only open to students with junior status or above.
Sound Design
The objective of this course is to help the student to understand the conceptual and technical challenges of sound, and the important communication role it plays when combined with visuals. Techniques of recording, generating, editing, synchronizing and manipulating sound data will be covered in depth, as will the conceptual issues of noise, sound and music. The goal is to create a keen awareness of the evocative, informational and temporal possibilities that sound offers in connection to the student’s visual work from other classes.
Current Topics
This course is a seminar-style class designed to cover emerging issues in technology and culture that impact the disciplines represented in the Animation and Digital Media concentrations. Emphasis is placed on in-depth discussions and explorations of professional practices and the societal trends that will shape the future of these disciplines. Intensive reading and research assignments, visits to professional studios and interviews with professionals provide a basis for class discussions.
Advanced Programming
This class offers an opportunity for students interested in interactivity, information design and the future of computer environments to further their programming skills and gain experience in VR ML cross-platform programming for use in virtual reality applications. The class will build on the experience of Web Design Programming (DMA 323). Students will be expected to produce a sophisticated piece of work as a display of their design and scripting skills.
Graphic Design
Time-Based Media II
The goal of this course is to expand the student’s understanding of how messages are created in time using, typography, image, sound and sequence. Projects develop the student’s ability to create time-based messages for projects, including digital motion graphics, film titles, dynamic information design and other applications where digital time-based messages represent an appropriate channel of communication.
Interactive Sound
This course develops the student’s understanding of the role of sound in interactive communication. Sound has the ability to suggest mood, elevate awareness and denote particular functions or activities. The specific nature of sound will be analyzed in its role as a signifier and rhetorical component in interactive and time-based solutions.
Information Design
This course develops the student’s ability to make complex data understandable to the user. Students will creatively use methods integrating symbols, images, formats, communication structures and language to develop solutions to applied projects making complex data expressive, interesting and accessible to defined end users. Projects include a combination of print and interactive media.
Industrial Design
Vehicle Packaging
This course gives transportation design students thorough knowledge of all of the elements that must be incorporated and adhered to when developing a feasible vehicle design. This class is required for transportation students with junior status only.
Science and Technology
Science and Technology covers the fundamentals of materials and manufacturing processes. Mass production methods in metal and plastic are the focus, including the fabrication of individual parts and the assembly of completed products. Students are taught a basic understanding of the limitations and possibilities of modern manufacturing methods.
Advanced Visual Communication (Alias)
This course is designed to strengthen the transportation student’s electronic drawing and rendering skills to a professional level, while at the same time fostering conceptual thinking. The work from this class becomes an important part of the student’s portfolio. Students use Alias software running on Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations.
Classical Art and Early Medieval
This course explores the roots of Western civilization in the classical Greco-Roman tradition. Since architecture and sculpture are the hallmarks of this period, major Greek and Roman monuments will be highlighted. The course will also discuss this classical tradition as the source of early Christian art, Byzantine art and early medieval art, including Romanesque.
20th Century Art in Europe
This course focuses on artists’ response to the sweeping social, philosophical and political changes that began in the late 19th century, including Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. Students will explore the work of modernists who affronted their audiences in order to bring about changes in perception, including the artists of the Dada movement, who mocked art and society, and the Surrealists, who explored the unconscious as a resource for art. Artists studied include Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst.
Survey of American Art
This course covers American artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the limner painters and the gravestone sculptors, the Hudson River School, the expatriates and the American impressionists. Artists studied include James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.
History of Interior Design
This course is a comprehensive survey of the historical development of interior design with emphasis on furniture and the decorative arts. The course begins with the designs and materials of Egypt, the classical Mediterranean, the Medieval world, Spain, the Italian, French, English, Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical periods, and leads to 19th and 20th century designs. Lectures on site study of museum collections, and field trips are included in the course. Students maintain a notebook/journal and individual projects are selected from the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts for oral and written presentation.
20th Century Art in America
This course covers such movements as the Ash Can School, the Regionalists and the Social Realists, who focused on representing American urban and rural environments, as well as the Abstract Expressionists and color-field painters, who left behind the world of traditional representation for explorations of energy and the quietude of meditation. Students will also explore the interaction of American and European artists as evidenced in such movements as Minimalism, Photorealism, Conceptualism and Neo-Expressionism.
Iconography and Mythology
This course explores key figures of the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, including Zeus, Jesus, Romulus and Remus, the apostles, the saints and the prodigal son, and the works of art they have inspired.
20th Century Architecture
This course will explore the major developments in Western architecture from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. Domestic, corporate, educational and cultural structures will be discussed and analyzed as examples of Modernist and post-Modernist aesthetic and social practice. Among notable architects to be considered are Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Albert Kahn, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry.
African American Art History
Introduces the art produced by African-American artists from the 1770s to the late 1940s, including the music and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Uses slide lectures, videos and other forms of presentation, along with gallery and museum visits, to present a vast store of art that has been largely ignored.
Art, Language and Literature
Students will explore the various links between the visual and literary arts through readings of plays, poems, stories, novels, letters, manifestoes, etc. that have been written by and/or about artists and designers.
Shoppers, Advertisers and Retailers: Consumption and American Culture
This course will offer students an introductory survey to the cultural, intellectual, social, and institutional histories of consumption in the United States. In particular, this course will pay attention to four issues: the development of the mass market at the end of the 19th century, the cultural and institutional histories of advertising and marketing, consumption and the construction of gender, race and sexuality and the longrunning debate over the social effects of consumption.
The Pursuit of Meaning
This course will explore the question: What is meaning in human experience? Reading and discussion will embrace an interdisciplinary investigation of the philosophical, anthropological, educational, sociological, and psychological dimensions of this pursuit.
Politics and Popular Culture
Political and social movements are often represented in symbols and images. The course will examine these symbols in art, film and literature, and determine their impact in political action and attitudes.