Compulsory modules

Seeing, Understanding and Making Meaning
This module develops both academic and contextual study skills. It engages with images, video, and multimedia as complex forms of communication. The module examines how meaning is constructed in visual media by the analysis of the work of others. This will help you begin to develop your own creative style. You will be introduced to core academic conventions for analysing and reflecting on your own work produced in the module and the visual material which influenced this.

Visual Elements and Design Principles
Discover the building blocks of graphic design. In this module you will explore the key visual elements—typography, line, shape, colour, texture, space, and more—and learn how to use them to communicate ideas clearly and creatively. Through practical projects, experimentation, and guided reflection, you will develop your own design skills and start to build a personal creative style. You’ll also study the work of other designers to understand how design communicates meaning and influences audiences.

Media Industries
This module introduces you to key tools you can use to analyse the social contexts, cultures, politics, and economics of media industries. From huge corporations to content creators, go behind the scenes to find out how media is produced, funded, regulated, distributed, and made across the globe. You will learn how media ownership, profit, and work are changing, and the role they play in shaping the media that gets made. The module further develops your academic skills needed for success in your degree.

Becoming a Cultural Citizen
This module provides you with the foundational tools and skills you need to develop your student profile. You will learn about the different pathways in your cultural or creative field while developing your own identity as a cultural critic, creative, and citizen. You will explore and map out your personal and professional development goals and plans, ensuring you make the most of your time at university and beyond. You will gain professional skills in communication and team working.

Optional Modules

3D Animation
This module provides a fundamental understanding of creating, rigging, and animating digital assets for film, games, and media. It builds up your knowledge and skills with industry-standard software like Maya or Blender, and the 12 principles of animation. Through design challenges, you will bring the illusion of life/movement into short sequences, and you will choose whether to focus your final project on games, film, or digital media content creation.

Compulsory modules

Advanced Visual Communication & Digital Identity
This module explores advanced typography, layouts, and visual hierarchy to create clear, engaging, and professional designs. The module focuses on developing complete branding and visual identity projects, then applying your designs in digital contexts. You’ll learn the basics of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design, giving you the skills to create work for websites, apps, and interactive media. You will also learn about intellectual property rights and the ethical considerations involved in design work.

Storytelling for Change
Learn how to tell compelling and persuasive multimedia stories about the issues you care about. You will work with other students to analyse what makes multimedia stories impactful, exploring narrative structures, design concepts, storytelling applications, and interactive and transmedia elements. You will develop a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of storytelling across media forms and put this into practice. The module builds your project management skills in preparation for your final year project.

Creative Digital Image Production
Creative Digital Image Production places an emphasis on both creative digital photographic practice and theory. You will be able to advance both your contextual understanding of digital photographic practice, your own creative photographic practice and professional photographic skills. In practical workshops we will explore studio and exterior lighting, the use of different lenses and the variety of techniques available to the contemporary photographer using digital image making equipment.

Optional Modules

Designing Comics and Graphic Novels
This module is an opportunity to develop your understanding of graphic novel and comic creation practices and theory using interdisciplinary approaches. You will develop your own short-form comic and practise your skills using traditional and digital methods. Ultimately, you will produce an original graphic narrative using industry-standard processes and software.

Promotional Cultures
Why is brand culture so ubiquitous in how we understand ourselves and our society, and the way we live our lives? You’ll investigate the histories and politics of marketing, advertising and consumerism, considering how and why promotional culture became such a key component of contemporary economies and societies. You’ll think critically about the social and political impacts of brand culture, including environmental harm, exploitation, and inequality. You’ll identify, discuss, and critically analyse key themes and trends in contemporary promotional culture.

Professional Experience with Graphic Design (Year 2)
This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside the University through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients), or working as a team to deliver a successful festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module’s requirements).

Pathways with Graphic Design
This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support an arts festival, you will build your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employers.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 5)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

Compulsory modules

Extended Graphic Design Project
This module gives you the opportunity to create a major, original graphic design project that showcases your skills, creativity, and personal style. You will take an idea from concept to completion, producing a professional-standard body of work that can form a key part of your portfolio. You’ll work independently, with guidance from a supervisor, applying advanced design techniques, research, and theory to develop projects for print, digital, or multimedia platforms.

User Experience and Interactive Design
In this cross-disciplinary module, you’ll explore how users interact with digital media—games, animations, graphic interfaces—and learn to design experiences that are intuitive, engaging, and effective. You’ll apply user-centred design principles, create interactive prototypes, and test ideas with real feedback. By investigating visual, audio, and motion design in interactive contexts, you’ll develop skills to create compelling digital experiences that put users first, preparing you for careers in UX design, interactive design, game UI, motion design, and digital media production.

Graphic Branding and Identity
Graphic Branding and Identity is an opportunity to learn about how brands operate in the world and to create your own branding. We will explore how brands influence people and how people use them to express their own identities and values. Working collaboratively and in response to industry briefs, you will apply your graphic design skills to create brand identities that are effective, appealing to people to do something specific such as donate to charity, buy something, visit an exhibition, or watch a film.

Optional Modules

Creative Magazine Production
You’ll plan and produce a group digital ‘journal’ or ‘magazine’ focused on culture. Each group will negotiate the types of articles to include, and the design and style of the publication in relation to their chosen market and target audience. Your finished work will be published online, capable to be presented in various digital formats. You’ll refine the creative and collaborative skills built up so far; you’ll develop your awareness of audiences and markets; and you’ll have a product to showcase after graduation.

Social Media Work
From Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to live streamers, influencers, and crowd workers, on this module you will explore what work really looks like in the global digital economy. You will deploy critical tools to understand the role that digital work plays in contemporary political and economic structures and apply this to analysis of working lives by engaging with guest Q&A sessions with workers. The module allows you to communicate your critical ideas about social media work in a creative format.

Memes, trends, and vibes: participatory social media cultures
Where do social media trends come from and what can they tell us about the politics and culture of our time? You’ll look in-depth at cultures of online participation, where marketers and users interact and contribute to the reproduction and circulation of content that promotes lifestyles and cultivates feelings or ‘vibes’. You’ll engage creatively and critically with the aesthetics and cultures of social media memes, trends and vibes, because what’s ‘trending’ tells us lots about our specific historical moment.

Professional Experience for Graphic Design (Level 6)
In your final year we offer you another opportunity to complete a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of clients), or work as part of a team to deliver a successful festival or event. Completed during the final stages of your degree, the module gives you cutting-edge experience of the sector you wish to enter following graduation as well as valuable employer contacts, thereby providing you with an effective career launchpad.

Employing Graphic Design: Putting Your Subject into Practice
Now you are preparing for life after graduation, this module enables you to put your degree skills into practice and work with employer-clients on a series of real-life projects. Enhancing the creative and collaborative skills you developed in your second year, this final-year module will develop your ability to work effectively with clients from a variety of settings, such as festivals, events, and publishers, and will enhance your confidence in presenting your work to your chosen employer-client.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 6)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.