Course summary

Our MA Visual Communication with Integrated International Pre-Masters is a year-long preparatory course of study to ready you for your Master’s in the UK, developing your English speaking and writing together with your specialist skills, research acumen and confidence in working autonomously. Take your design work to the next level on our MA Visual Communication degree at UCA Canterbury, and become a cultural innovator who can use your work to entertain, inform and persuade. On this course, you’ll explore the ways in which you can convey messages and meaning through a diverse range of media - from print and motion to digital - and you’ll be encouraged to develop new skills to strengthen and inform your design practice. You’ll learn to approach design as an agent of change – a strategy for positively transforming behaviours in desirable and sustainable ways. You’ll also have the opportunity to collaborate with other members of our creative community and enhance your work in the areas needed to become a creative leader within the field of visual communication - an area that spans print media, user experience, motion design, web design, exhibition design and advertising. MA Visual Communication is designed to help you develop your identity as an author and innovator, equipping you with the skills and knowledge to identify and solve design problems within cross-disciplinary environments, including traditional and digital printmaking, moving image suites and 3D studios. Led by Hugh Harwood and a team of experienced professional designers with connections at the highest level of industry – including Slawa Harasymowicz and Vida Vega – you’ll learn through a range of lectures, project briefs, workshops, written assignments, group critiques and individual tutorials. The MA is also available as an MFA route which offers a further enhanced opportunity for students wanting to develop their professional portfolio to the highest level, or to build a proposal for Doctoral level study, and pursue an academic research career path. Applicants can apply to undertake the full MFA, or undertake an MA and transfer to the MFA at the end of the MA period.