Art & Design at Worcester recognises and enables you to develop connections between a range of practices in art and design fields. The course will introduce you to an array of tools, both traditional and digital, and will support your use of them alongside the evaluative and critical skills that are appropriate to your study as it develops. Modules are consequently designed to enable you to exploit your creative potential and to grow your visual communication skills, working with a broad range of media. The first year is ‘diagnostic’ in that it aims to provide you with an opportunity to sample working with a variety of media and practices and to review your previous experience. It introduces you to different areas of visual communication through teaching and learning that encourages experimentation, self-directed study and project work. By the end of the first year, you will have had an opportunity to explore where your particular interests lie and, in the second year, you will be able to build on these and to develop your individual practice and visual language through increasing emphasis upon experimentation, innovation and project-based learning. The third year focuses on encouraging you to consolidate your practice through independent study and through development of professional competencies that will enhance your employability, with learning taking place through Professional Practice, Placement and Final Show modules, amongst others. The course is supported by a programme of research trips in which you are encouraged to participate. In recent years, there have been trips to Rome, Florence, New York and Berlin, and new destinations are planned this year.

This course can provide an excellent foundation for a work in, for example, publishing, art therapy, graphic design, web design, textile design, multimedia design, arts administration and teaching. Increasingly, graduates are working as freelancers and running their own businesses.