Graphic Design MA

Program Overview

The MA Graphic Design program at Kingston School of Art emphasizes a practice-based, research-oriented approach to graphic design. It challenges traditional roles and encourages experimentation, critical thinking, and socially responsible design. The program offers core modules in critical making, theoretical perspectives, future practices, and presentation, as well as an optional professional placement year. Graduates are equipped with the skills and knowledge to work in various design fields, including project management, art direction, and research.

Program Outline

It challenges assumptions about the designer and their role as a researcher, facilitator, producer, artist, storyteller, teacher, author, entrepreneur, provocateur, leader, and agent of change. The program emphasizes socially and ecologically responsible thinking and making within a discursive studio-based community of practice. Risk, play, and experimentation are valued within a rigorous academic framework. The diverse positions and experiences of students are integral to the examination and challenging of graphic design. It challenges design conventions and finds new ways of giving shape to contemporary issues and ideas through the visual and material tools of graphic design.

• Reading: Critical Positions: This module introduces ways of theorising contemporary and historical design to enable students to locate their practice within wider professional, social and political contexts and an interdisciplinary framework.
Students will investigate key current issues within design and participate in critical debates, developing a theoretical and conceptual vocabulary. Through projects and workshops, students will anticipate new multidimensional and/or hybrid practices in local and global contexts. Research groups will be co-created to provide a broad scope of shared resources and new modalities of knowledge. Real-world scenarios set by external partners will be examined through elective collaborative projects that situate their creative practice within contemporary paradigms.
• Studio: Extended Research Project for Illustration: This module helps students build a space for their future practice through enquiry-led learning, conceptual depth, critical imagination, and practice-based research.
They will embrace creative agency as a means of initiating, testing, and completing their research project individually or in collaboration with internal or external partners. The Extended Research Project (capstone project) provides a framework for recognizing and engaging with a range of transferable skills, such as time-management, art direction, community collaboration, ethical responsibility, performative presentation, sustainable practices, convivial discourse, social and technological networks.

Optional Professional Placement:

This module allows students to apply their knowledge and skills to an appropriate working environment, developing and enhancing key employability skills and subject-specific professional skills in their chosen subject.

Assessment:

Assessment typically comprises exams, practical (e.g. presentations, performance), and coursework (e.g. essays, reports, self-assessment, portfolios, dissertation). Feedback on assessments is provided within 20 working days.

Teaching:

Students benefit from a variety of different learning and teaching approaches, including brief-led project work, workshops that encourage creative experimentation and individual critical reflection. A dialogic and discursive approach to learning and teaching is employed through peer-led learning, discussion groups, and seminars.

Careers:

The program's curriculum is designed to support students in developing the Future Skills needed by the design industry, including problem solving, adaptability, critical thinking, teamwork, creativity, and independence. Graduates work in project management, event organisation, data visualisation and information design, visual identity, art direction, typography, interactions (UX/AI), filmmaking, brand strategy, and research.

Home 2025/26 MA full time £12,400 MA part time £6,820 International 2025/26 MA full time £21,800 MA part time £11,990 Home 2024/25 MA full time £11,900 MA part time £6,545 International 2024/25 MA full time £20,900 MA part time £11,495 If you start your second year straight after Year 1, you will pay the same fee for both years. If you take a break before starting your second year, or if you repeat modules from Year 1 in Year 2, the fee for your second year may increase.

Scholarships and bursaries

Kingston University offers a range of postgraduate scholarships, including: Alumni discount Progression Scholarship