BMGT 458Q: Special Topics in Marketing; Computer Graphics Workshop

Spring 2013, University of Maryland

This course was an intro­duc­tion to com­put­er graph­ics and visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion prin­ci­ples for stu­dents in the Robert H. Smith School of Busi­ness Design and Inno­va­tion Mar­ket­ing Fel­lows pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land. Stu­dents explored fun­da­men­tal design prin­ci­ples through dig­i­tal visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion projects. Tech­nol­o­gy con­tent includ­ed pho­to manip­u­la­tion (Pho­to­shop), dig­i­tal illus­tra­tion (Illus­tra­tor), lay­out (InDe­sign), and web design (Dreamweaver).

For their final print project, stu­dents put togeth­er a six-page mag­a­zine spread using InDe­sign, Illus­tra­tor and Pho­to­shop, on a top­ic of their choos­ing. Below are exam­ples of two stu­dents’ ini­tial and final drafts of this project, after two rounds of cri­tique and feed­back. View the project assignment.

Student 1

Student 2

HONR 268R: Creative Expression and the Web

Fall 2010, University of Maryland

In the fall of 2010 I devel­oped a sem­i­nar course called “Cre­ative Expres­sion and the Web” for the Hon­ors pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land. In this class, stu­dents from a wide assort­ment of majors learned the basics of web design the­o­ry and prac­tice. We worked in a lab envi­ron­ment, using the text­book, Inter­ACT with Web Stan­dards: A holis­tic approach to web design (Voic­es That Mat­ter) which had just been pub­lished at the time. View the syllabus.

For their final project stu­dents cre­at­ed a small web­site of sev­er­al pages that demon­strat­ed the prin­ci­ples and prac­tices of web-stan­dards-based web design that they learned through­out the semes­ter. This project gave them hands-on prac­tice with plan­ning, build­ing and deploy­ing a com­plete, work­ing site that exem­pli­fied best prac­tices in web design. View the project assignment.