Communication Design is a powerful tool to shape culture. Our vibrant learning community fosters leadership skills as, together, we explore, redefine, and innovate. Our curriculum combines critical cultural observation with emerging technologies to develop your own design process and establish yourself as a cultural actor.
Our terminal MFA degree program sits at the intersection of visual language, cultural criticism, and media studies. We prepare creatives to be confident, independent practitioners who are strategic technology users, innovative researchers, writers, pedagogues, and ultimately leaders in the communication design professions. Our students gain interdisciplinary knowledge that supports critical discourse and the development of a significant body of work characterized by experimentation, creativity, resiliency and include non-dominant ways of knowing, thinking, and doing.
In our program, we understand design as the myriad ways we create meaningful communications making complex information accessible, producing compelling experiences, and enacting social change. We support students by exploring many of these possibilities to find a disciplinary space in which to excel and find deep satisfaction. During the program the students accomplish versatility and expert capabilities with communications tools and strategies across numerous technologies, demonstrated through critical responses that understand design as collective action that address socio-economical and environmental issues.
What we believe
We believe designers are cultural actors who use their expertise to inform, persuade, and entertain in order to create the world they imagine. In our classes, students apply socio-ecologically sustainable processes and research to design transformative strategies for communication and interactions between people and communities that promote a diverse, equitable and just society.
Our students develop their voices as both designers and authors by creating and engaging design challenges within the program’s cross-disciplinary framework. Students approach design as a process of learning, a communal experience, and a process to enact change. Our program integrates situated knowledge and perspectives with histories, principles, and practices of communications design to support the creation of speculative artifacts, modes of representation, platforms, and systems serving intersectional identities and abilities.
After graduation
This program lays the foundation for both professional practice and academic careers. Graduates enter the professional world with advanced critical skills and an articulate body of work, prepared to work in print and digital media, typography, identity systems and branding, design strategy, social media, interaction design, motion design, environmental design, data visualization, information design, and user experience design.
Upon completion of their studies, students:
Apply socio-ecologically sustainable processes and research to design transformative strategies for communication and interactions between people and communities that promote a diverse, equitable, and just society.
Integrate situated knowledge and perspectives with histories, principles, and practices of communications design to support the creation of speculative artifacts, modes of representation, platforms, and systems serving intersectional identities and abilities.
Attain interdisciplinary knowledge that supports critical discourse and the development of a significant body of work characterized by experimentation, creativity, and resiliency and include non-dominant ways of knowing, thinking, and doing.
Accomplish versatility and expert capabilities with communications tools and strategies across numerous technologies, demonstrated through critical responses that recognize design as collective action that address socio-economical and environmental issues.
Graduate Studio: Technology A/B critically analyze and explore the tools, skills, and production methods of current and emerging technologies.
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Graduate Studio: Visual Language A/B explores the principles and methodologies associated with the development of communication design as a visual language. DES-710A/DES-710B
Graduate Studio: Transformation Design A/B discusses how to transform the behaviors of individuals in desirable and sustainable ways, while creating meaningful experiences and interactions for people. DES-730A/DES-730B
Cross-Disciplinary Studio introduces the student to communications design as it interfaces with, and is influenced by, other design disciplines. It emphasizes collaboration and cross-disciplinarity while encouraging students to seek and solve design problems and issues that focus on community and social outreach. DES-741
The thesis arc is the core of our Master degree program. Thesis Arc courses model how professional design practice works at the highest level and offers invaluable skills to students who will pursue both professional and academic paths after graduation.
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Our Faculty
Our outstanding Communications Design faculty teaching in the MFA program are professionals and scholars in graphic design, illustration, packaging design, and related disciplinary practices. They are passionate about design and accessibility, service design, community-based participatory research, design for social impact, policy and organizational change, bio design, interaction design, creative coding, and digital storytelling.
We believe that design at its best is a force for good: it connects, enables, sustains, empowers, and humanizes. Across our programs, we explore the expansiveness of this idea. As a student here, you’ll design messages, objects, spaces, and systems, and discover the power of your practice—to creatively change the world you’re in and the world around you.
The design studio is at the core of your educational experience at Pratt. We consider the design studio a creative space and a community. The culture of the design studio is one of creativity, experimentation, and exploration. Students are encouraged to take risks and push the boundaries of what is possible. The studio is a community to find support, encouragement, and inspiration.
Sustainability and material exploration drive our passion for making. We are hands-on and immersive; any student of design can discover, iterate and refine their investigations through our many labs.
We develop disciplinary fluency in our program of study and we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of design critical to address the plurality and complexity of the environments in which we operate.
Pratt is a diverse, international community of students and faculty working together in a very local community, connecting with our immediate and global neighbors, in the hyper international city of New York.
Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leading diverse and thriving careers, addressing critical challenges and creating innovative work that reimagines our world. Graduates move on to a diverse selection of companies and institutions, including MIT, MoMA, the NY Times, RISD, Nike, Apple, Scholastic, BBDO, TBWA, and Google. They also go on to become entrepreneurs and principals leading their own studios and businesses or pursue career in academia.
