Undergraduate · Studio · 4 credits
Graphic Design 1
Visual Thinking & Foundations
PREREQUISITES
no prerequisites
OFFERED
fall, spring
LEVEL
300-level
A foundation studio course introducing visual perception, compositional structure, semiotics, and image-making. Every project begins with physical materials before moving to digital tools.
Syllabus
Key information — full syllabus available as PDF
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Develop visual sensitivity — the ability to read and produce meaning through form, scale, placement, and proportion
Understand and apply the foundational principles of design: balance, tension, rhythm, movement, and hierarchy
Build a working vocabulary of design elements and principles
Produce original work in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign
Practice analog-first design process: sketching, cutting, and arranging before digital construction
Engage critically with the relationship between form and meaning
Develop habits of refinement: the ability to step back, evaluate, and return to work with a more developed eye
STRUCTURE
4 major projects, sequenced from abstract to applied
Each project introduces one Adobe application: Illustrator (P1, P2), Photoshop (P3), InDesign (P4)
All projects begin with analog work — hand-cutting, collage, or sketching — before any digital construction
Process book maintained throughout the semester
Mid-project and final critiques for each project
Small written self-assessments accompany each project
ASSESSMENT
Ungraded — students propose their own final grades
Self-reflections accompany each project
End-of-semester grade conference with instructor
End-of-semester process book with overall self-assessment submitted as primary evidence of growth
TEEXTBOOKS
No required textbooks.
Course draws on readings from: - Rob Roy Kelly — pedagogical writings on foundational design education - Dondis A. Dondis — A Primer of Visual Literacy - Ellen Lupton — Thinking with Type - Robert Bringhurst — The Elements of Typographic Style - Josef Albers — Interaction of Color Readings distributed via course management system.
Projects
Major projects per semester:
GD 1 Project 1: Black Square Studies
An introduction to abstract composition using only black squares on a white ground. Students explore five compositional states — balance, tension, rhythm, movement, and hierarchy — through physical cut-paper arrangements before translating selected studies to vector in Adobe Illustrator. There is no color, no texture, no imagery, no text. The constraint is the lesson.
GD 1 Project 2 : Symbol System
Students design a cohesive system of six symbols unified by a shared visual logic. Choosing from four subject categories — Emotions, Community, Transformation, or Time — students abstract concepts that resist literal depiction. The project introduces semiotics, system thinking, and the discipline of simplification.
GD 1 Project 3: Imagined Realities Poster
Students design an 11" × 17" photomontage composite poster that makes a visual argument on a social theme — Social Justice, Community, Environment, or Power. Combining a minimum of three photographic source images with a headline and tagline, students learn to construct meaning through the relationship between image and text. Adobe Photoshop is introduced for image compositing and masking.
Course Overview
- Graphic Design 1 is simultaneously a foundational course for design students and an art core liberal education option open to all students at Pacific University. That dual identity shapes everything about how the course is structured. Design students enter as the first step in a deliberate sequence leading to GD2, Advanced Studio, and Capstone. Liberal arts students may have no prior design experience and no intention of continuing in design. Both groups are in the same room, and the course has to serve both without diminishing either.
I have been teaching a version of this course since 2005, across four institutions: the University of Minnesota Duluth, Buena Vista University, Bradley University, and now Pacific University. At every previous institution, the course was restricted to art and design students. At Pacific, it is open to the entire university (as a liberal education art elective). That shift changed how I teach it. The course has to be grounded in something that matters to both populations — the development of visual literacy, the ability to see and make meaning through form. That is the through line. The professional skills are built on top of it.
The course is continuously modified. In earlier iterations, I began with photography, reasoning that taking images was accessible and would provide an approachable entry into design thinking. What I found instead was that students used photographic familiarity as a crutch — defaulting to documentation rather than composition, to subject matter rather than form. In Spring 2026, I reordered the sequence, placing the Black Square Studies first. Removing photography from the opening weeks removed the escape route. Students had to learn to see before they had anything to look at.
Each of the four projects addresses three things simultaneously: visual literacy, design elements and principles, and technology. The technology scaffolding is deliberate — Illustrator in Projects 1 and 2, Photoshop in Project 3, and InDesign in Project 4. By the end of the semester, students have a working relationship with all three primary tools in the Adobe Creative Suite — not mastery, but enough fluency to continue building.In 2026, I formalized my conviction about teaching into a manifesto. First, play: A Manifesto for Design Education argues that design education, done well, is a liberal education — and that before you can design, you need to understand; before you can understand, you need to see; before you can see, you need to make; before you can make, you need to play. That sequence is not rhetorical. It is the structure of this course. The manifesto draws on Gunnar Swanson’s foundational 1994 essay "Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art," which argued that design should be regarded as a broad field of human inquiry rather than a trade or technical skill. Thirty years later, that argument is more urgent, not less.
Rob Roy Kelly, whose pedagogical writings directly inform the current structure of this course, argued that a major fault in visual education lies with teachers who attempt to move students from the beginning to the practice too quickly. His framework — theoretical before applied, hand before screen, refinement over production, sequential exercises with strict limitations — articulates something I had been working toward intuitively for years before I encountered his writing. Josef Albers made the same argument through his color course at Yale: the searching process matters more than the end result. Dondis A. Dondis identified the same gap in A Primer of Visual Literacy: we demand visual communication from students who have never been taught the grammar of seeing. Ellen Lupton’s writing on mark-making and image-text relationships informs the middle projects. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style — with its insistence that typography exists to honor content — is the premise of the final project.
Many students arrive having spent their entire lives looking at screens. They have consumed images without learning to see. They are afraid to try, afraid to fail, convinced that everything they make must be curated and shareable. The manifesto names this directly: they have never been allowed to sit in the mud. Part of what I do as an educator is to put them there — the productive mess of making things without judgment, simply for the sake of creating. The Black Square Studies are that mud. The progress book — a working record of every arrangement tried, every decision reconsidered — is the evidence that they were there.
My assessment practice has evolved alongside the course. Earlier versions used rubric-based grading. The current version uses an ungrading model: students maintain progress books, participate in grade conferences, and propose their own final grades supported by evidence of growth and reflection. Kelly argued that making students responsible for all work over a semester is educationally more effective than setting a deadline, grading the work, and returning it. The manifesto frames this as design needing time — not just the time to meet deadlines, but the time to truly understand. GD1 is not finished. I do not expect it to be. Each semester I observe something I did not expect. The project reflections below are an honest account of what I have built, what I have changed, and what I am still figuring out.
Course Reflection
- I have been teaching a version of Graphic Design 1 since 2005 at Rochester Community & Technical College, the University of Minnesota Duluth, Buena Vista University, Bradley University, and now Pacific University. The course has looked different at every institution. The student body has changed. The tools have changed. The sequence of projects has changed, sometimes dramatically. What has not changed is the premise: design is a visual language, and before students can speak it with intention, they have to learn to read it. That conviction has been the foundation of my teaching since I began, and it shapes every decision I make about what goes into this course and the order in which it is presented.
In 2026, I formalized that conviction into a manifesto. First, play: A Manifesto for Design Education is not a description of how I teach. It is an argument for why design education, done well, is a liberal education — and why so much of it falls short. The manifesto draws on Gunnar Swanson's foundational 1994 essay "Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art," which argued that design should be regarded as a broad field of human inquiry rather than a trade or technical skill. Thirty years later, that argument is more urgent, not less. GD1 is my effort to make it real in a classroom.
The manifesto begins: before you can design, you need to understand. Before you can understand, you need to see. Before you can see, you need to make. Before you can make, you need to play. That sequence is not rhetorical. It is the structure of this course. The Black Square Studies — the first project in the current sequence — play in the precise sense the manifesto describes: constraint-based, analog, ungraded in the conventional sense, with no audience to impress and no correct answer to produce. Students cut paper and arrange squares on a white ground. They step back. They rearrange. They photograph their variations. The studio, as the manifesto argues, must be a place where the algorithm doesn’t exist. That project is that place.
I spend more time thinking about GD1 than any other course I teach. That is not because it is the most complex — it is because it is the most consequential. GD1 is not an introductory course in the sense of being preliminary or lesser. It is foundational in the architectural sense. It is what everything else is built on. A student who leaves GD1 without the ability to see formal relationships — to read how placement, scale, proportion, and interval produce meaning — will struggle in every subsequent course, not because the later courses are harder, but because they assume a perceptual foundation that was never laid. I am particular about the projects, the sequence, and the scaffolding of knowledge and skills because I have seen, across twenty years and four institutions, what happens when that foundation is weak.
Rob Roy Kelly, whose pedagogical writings directly inform the current structure of this course, argued that a major fault in visual education lies with teachers who attempt to move students from the beginning to the practice too quickly. His framework — theoretical before applied, hand before screen, refinement over production, sequential exercises with strict limitations of criteria, materials, and format — articulates something I had been working toward intuitively for years before I encountered his writing. Josef Albers made the same argument in his color course at Yale: the search process matters more than the end result, and sensitivity cannot be taught, but students can be made aware of it and cultivate their intuitive capabilities. Dondis A. Dondis identified the same gap in A Primer of Visual Literacy: we demand visual communication from students who have never been taught the grammar of seeing. Ellen Lupton’s writing on mark-making, reduction, and image-text relationships informs the middle projects. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style — with its insistence that typography exists to honor content — is the premise of the final project. These are not references imported to legitimize existing practice. They are the scholarly framework that explains what I was already doing and has sharpened how I do it.
My teaching philosophy, which I first articulated in 2005 and have held with remarkable consistency since, states that technology serves concept rather than replacing it, and that students should work by hand in the earlier stages of the design process — not out of nostalgia for pre-digital methods but because, as the manifesto argues, the hand carries knowledge that cannot be typed or clicked. The manifesto puts it directly: when Paula Scher sketched the Citibank logo on a napkin in just minutes, she was not working quickly. She was tapping into years of accumulated knowledge — encompassing history, culture, form, and meaning — much of which had been built by hand. The napkin wasn’t a shortcut. It was the proof of everything that came before it. The analog-first methodology that now structures every project in GD1 is the fullest expression of that conviction.
The course at Pacific presents a particular challenge that has sharpened my thinking considerably. At every previous institution, GD1 was restricted to art and design students. At Pacific, it serves simultaneously as a foundational course for design students and as an art core liberal education option open to the university as a whole. Both populations are in the same room. Design students need the course as the first step in a deliberate sequence that will carry them through GD2, Typography, Advanced Studio, and Capstone. Liberal arts students may have no prior design experience and no intention of continuing in design. The manifesto addresses this directly: design education is not career training. It is a liberal education. A student who develops visual literacy — the ability to read and produce meaning through form — has acquired something that extends well beyond graphic design practice. Design is fundamentally the study of relationships: between people and objects, creators and cultures, the visual and the contextual. Those relationships are worth understanding regardless of whether a student ever opens Illustrator again.
Many students arrive having spent their entire lives looking at screens. They have consumed images without learning to see. They are afraid to try, afraid to fail, convinced that everything they make must be curated and shareable. The manifesto names this directly: they have never been allowed to sit in the mud. Part of what I do as an educator is to put them there — not literal mud, but the productive mess of making things without judgment, simply for the sake of creating. The Black Square Studies are that mud. The process book — a working record of every arrangement tried, every decision reconsidered — is the evidence that they were there.
My assessment practice has evolved alongside the course structure. Earlier versions of this course used rubric-based grading. The current version uses an ungrading model: students maintain process books, participate in grade discussions, and propose their own final grades supported by evidence of growth and reflection. Kelly argued that making students responsible for all work over a semester is educationally more effective than setting a deadline, grading the work, and returning it. When students retain ownership of their work and continue refining it, they learn more than when the work is evaluated and closed. The manifesto frames this as design needing time — not just the time to meet deadlines, but the time to truly understand. My grade conferences and student self-assessments are the structured version of that argument: a conversation about growth, about what the student can now see that they could not see at the beginning of the semester, and about what they are still working toward. The process book is the evidence, and the discussions are the assessment.
GD1 is not finished. I do not expect it to be. Each semester, I observe something I did not expect — a place where the sequence breaks down, a constraint that cost more than it gave, a project that produced stronger work than I anticipated, and raised new questions about why. The reflection that follows, organized by project, is an honest account of what I have built, what I have changed, and what I am still figuring out. It is written in the same spirit Kelly brought to his own pedagogical writing, and in the spirit of the manifesto: not as a how-to, but as a record of practice and an argument that the practice matters.
Selected Student Self-Reflections
"Looking back on this semester and my growth, I’ve realized that design and art in the digital world are way more than just knowing how to use a computer or photoshop. When I started, I mostly thought of it as a technical challenge like just learning the software. But after these four projects, I see that every choice, like which font I pick or how big I make a photo, is actually part of an argument and a bigger picture. I feel like I’ve gone from being super cautious and not confident in my ideas to more comfortable taking risks and trying out different ideas.
I really struggled with creativity at the beginning of the semester and it just felt like I was unsure of everything. During the first project with the black squares, I felt a little stuck and I kept looking for an answer instead of just playing around with the shapes until one looked right. I used to think that being creative was something you were just born with, but now I see it’s more like a muscle and something you can practice. The more I pushed through the boring or bad ideas during the brainstorming phase, the easier it became to find something cool. By the time I got to the final Zine project, I wasn’t scared of the blank page anymore because I knew I had a process that I could use that was practiced the whole semester.
The biggest thing that helped me was working by hand first. At the start, I just wanted to jump into Illustrator or Photoshop because I thought cutting paper was a waste of time but I did not realize how important the analog process is. Slowing down actually helped me think and helped form better ideas. When I was physically moving squares around or cutting out photos for my collage, I found things that I never would have seen on a screen. By the time I actually opened my laptop, the hard work of figuring out the layout was already done and all I had to do was put it on a screen.
I think my biggest strength now is making things look clean and organized. I’ve gotten really good at using grids and making sure the most important information stands out. I’m proud of how I can take a big, messy idea and turn it into a professional looking layout. For areas of growth, I still want to get faster at the technical side of Photoshop. I also want to keep pushing myself to find more creative symbols instead of just going with the first thing that pops into my head.
The coolest part is how this outside the box thinking has started to show up in the rest of my life. I find myself looking at things like menus or posters and automatically analyzing how they’re put together just like we did in class. It’s also made me a better problem solver in general. I’ve learned that the first version of anything, whether it’s an essay or a design, is usually going to be a little rough, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the process of getting to a great final result.
Going forward, I want to keep thinking outside the box and applying those principles to my everyday life. Whether that be for homework or a project for another class, it is a good practice to follow. As a future PT, things will not always be cookie cutter but thinking outside the box in that profession is super important as well." T.N. (2026)
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"This semester challenged me to grow creatively, technically, and personally as a designer. Throughout the course, I developed a stronger understanding of visual storytelling, composition, typography, and the relationship between analog and digital design processes. At the beginning of the semester, I was more comfortable working digitally and focused mainly on making projects look visually appealing. However, over time I learned that successful design is not just about aesthetics. It is about communicating emotion, ideas, and meaning through intentional choices. Looking back at my projects, I can clearly see growth in both my confidence and my ability to think conceptually as a designer.
One of my biggest strengths this semester was creating work that felt personal and emotionally connected. Many of my projects explored themes such as sports, teamwork, memory, identity, and storytelling because those topics are meaningful to me. I noticed that when I connected my own experiences and interests to a project, my designs became more authentic and engaging. I also became stronger in composition and visual hierarchy. Earlier in the semester, I focused mostly on placing images and text in ways that looked balanced, but I gradually learned how composition can guide a viewer’s attention and create a narrative. I became more intentional about spacing, contrast, layering, and typography to help strengthen the meaning behind each piece.
Another strength I developed was adaptability. Some assignments pushed me outside of my comfort zone, especially projects involving physical collage and analog techniques. At first, I struggled because I was used to relying on digital tools where everything could easily be adjusted or undone. Working by hand forced me to think differently about texture, placement, and experimentation. I learned that imperfections and handmade qualities can actually make a design feel more emotional and human. The analog process taught me to slow down, trust experimentation, and focus more on the creative process instead of only the final result. When I transitioned those ideas into digital work, my projects felt more layered, intentional, and visually interesting.
Although I made a lot of progress this semester, there are still areas where I want to continue improving. One challenge for me was trusting my creative instincts. I often spent too much time overthinking layouts or questioning whether my ideas were strong enough. Sometimes this slowed my process and made me hesitant to take creative risks. Going forward, I want to become more confident in experimenting with unexpected ideas and trusting my design decisions earlier in the process. I also want to improve my typography skills. While I became more aware of how typography affects tone, hierarchy, and visual identity, I still sometimes struggle with selecting typefaces and text treatments that fully support the concept of a project. I hope to continue studying typography and practicing ways to make text feel more integrated into my designs.
This semester also helped me identify my emerging design voice. I realized that I am most drawn to projects that focus on emotion, storytelling, and human connection. Whether I was designing sports related pieces, collages, or editorial layouts, I consistently gravitated toward designs that felt reflective and narrative driven. I enjoy combining photography, layered imagery, and typography to create pieces that communicate memories, experiences, and emotions. My work often includes themes of nostalgia, identity, teamwork, and connection because I believe design is most impactful when it creates an emotional response.
The combination of analog and digital processes had one of the biggest impacts on my growth this semester. Before this class, I viewed design mostly through a digital lens, but working physically with materials expanded my understanding of creativity. Cutting, layering, arranging, and experimenting by hand helped me discover ideas that I would not have developed on a computer alone. This experience changed the way I approach digital work because I now think more carefully about texture, balance, and composition.
Going forward, my goal is to continue growing both technically and creatively. I want to become more confident in my ideas, take more creative risks, and continue developing my storytelling abilities through design. I am especially interested in editorial and sports design because they combine many of my passions for communication, identity, and visual storytelling. This semester taught me that strong design is not just about making something look good. It is about creating meaning, emotion, and connection through visuals." K.C. (2026)
"One of the most important things I learned this semester was the value of the analog process. Brainstorming, thumbnail sketching, mind maps, and hand-drawn sketches played a huge role in helping me develop ideas before moving into digital design. At first, I underestimated how important the early analog stages were, but throughout the semester I realized that some of my strongest ideas came from quickly sketching concepts and experimenting freely on paper. The analog process helped me think more openly and creatively because it allowed me to focus on ideas instead of perfection. It also taught me that design is not only about the final product — it is about experimentation, revisions, problem-solving, and development over time." - A.K., 2026