This workshop will familiarize students with basic principles of graphic design while using Adobe InDesign as its formal playground. Exercises will be centered around the confluence of type and image, with a particular focus on editorial/publication contexts. The workshop will help students better understand the designerly contexts in which illustrated material often exists, how typography critically impacts those contexts and how the illustrations within them are perceived as a result. Assignments will range across a variety of print applications such as publication/editorial spreads, posters, zines, brochures, etc, in the form of guided in-class exercises that will familiarize them with layout design principles while training them in the technical use of InDesign. They will gain hands-on experience with InDesign’s key features—including master pages, typographic styles, grids, export settings, etc—to build print-ready layouts. The course will also place emphasis on print production literacy—introducing students to the technicalities of preparing files for print—color profiles, scale, resolution, paper stock, binding, large-format printing etc— and the logistics of working with print technicians. Students will be required to engage with the RISD Print Center to develop fluency in the practical processes and constraints of producing their own print-ready work, demystifying production workflows early in their academic careers. 

Note: Students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe InDesign installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

Illustrators increasingly contribute to packaging and object-based design contexts, becoming powerful conveyors of brand vision and personality. This workshop will introduce students to the fundamentals of package design, with a focus on developing both technical proficiency and contextual sensitivity in designing for three-dimensional printed surfaces. Centered on Adobe Illustrator as the primary tool for vector-based design and professional production workflows, the course provides students with hands-on training in creating artwork for packaging across various formats and materials. Students will learn to think beyond flat compositions, exploring how illustration can activate, enhance, and interact with physical form. The workshop will be structured in the form of in-class guided exercises that involve creating dielines, applying artwork to 3D mockups, exploring surface design and patterning, and considering the relationship between illustration, graphic design, and interactivity. It will also compel them to conceptualize packaging in a holistic manner—understanding shelf appeal, incorporating regulatory content, creating typographic hierarchy, or considering nested artefacts like leaflets/instruction manuals. In addition to design development, the course will emphasize production constraints such as material selection, scaling and dimensioning, color fidelity, and the logistics of working with print vendors. The workshop will also require students to engage with the RISD Print Center to develop fluency in print-ready production. By the end, students will have produced a range of physical packaging prototypes for different contexts/objects, gaining appreciation for the relationship between illustration, graphic design and print production. 

Note: Students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe Illustrator installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

This workshop introduces Illustration students to the fundamentals of branding and visual identity, with a focus on the illustrator’s role in shaping and supporting brand expression. The course demystifies industry terminology around branding and identity design—tone of voice, brand values and mission, audience positioning—offering hands-on experience in developing illustrated brand elements that are cohesive and responsive to a brand’s identity. The workshop will be structured in the form of in-class, guided exercises that revolve around real and fictional brand briefs, teaching them how to understand and adapt to a brand guideline and work across a range of sectors and tonal profiles—from playful to serious, minimalist to expressive. Using Adobe Illustrator as our primary tool, the workshop will place a particular emphasis on illustrating for logos and brand marks—students will learn how to create vector-based logos and supporting brand elements that are scalable, versatile, and visually aligned with a brand’s mission and personality. Many exercises will also include designing for print production, and students will be required to engage with the RISD Print Center. At the end of the workshop, students will have adapted to a variety of identity design contexts—logos, printed stationery/merchandise, web, social media, etc—that will sensitize them to the practical constraints of scalability and legibility when it comes to producing branded artefacts. 

Note: Students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe Illustrator installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

The first core studio in the program is centered on an investigation of the mechanics of articulating meaning in an image. Through a variety of projects, students will investigate the efficacy of various strategies in traditional and new media, and engage in perceptual experiments in order to study the intersection of art and visual psychology.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar addresses key critical theory and socio-political aspects of illustration practices from a historical perspective. Reading, discussion, and meaningful integration of ideas into studio writing and activity are goals of the course. Class will meet two times per week including supported research times in various special collections and the library. Faculty determine the content of the seminar each term, balancing attention to issues defined by the expertise and interests of the graduate cohort and subjects of relevance to the field and professional practice. Theorists of special concern to contemporary illustration practice will be highlighted; statistics and technical information about communication media will illuminate how art objects have circulated in their own eras. Critical reading, writing, and presentation will be assessed.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $75.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

A defining aspect of human consciousness is creation of meaning through the construction of narrative- a particularly potent mode of communication because it conveys information in a way that allows us to empathetically imagine the lives of others. Beyond the limitations of facts, polemic or data narrative entrances, narrative entertains and enriches us. As such, it is a basic element of Illustration. This class seeks to examine why and how stories matter in the context of traditional and contemporary world culture. We will explore how story construction, narrative voice, imagery, and choice of media intersect to create meaning and reach various audiences. We will look a broad scope of narrative strategies (linear, symbolic, interactive, etc.) from the revelations of the handmade artist's book to cutting-edge technology that is shaping narrative and its reception.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course focuses on illustrated narratives. To do this, we will start the semester by looking at why stories exist and how they function. We’ll study how written language forms images in our minds and explore how illustrations interact with this process. Alongside this, we’ll look at examples of illustrated narratives—children’s books, art books, graphic novels, short stories, poetry, and novels—supported by theoretical readings and cultural context. The hope is that you’ll find new ways of thinking and writing about your work and the work of others. The aim is also to help bridge the semester’s writing workshop with your studio course, and to support your efforts to use your written stories in your studio. Assignments will involve weekly reading responses, creative exercises, presentations, and a final portfolio.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $260.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In his 1909 An Essay in Aesthetics, Roger Fry talks about the moral purpose of art-to offer viewers the opportunity to experience emotion with objectivity. Rather than actually witnessing a terrible accident in a train station, in a film we are able to experience the event and its associated emotions without the urgency of response required if it were truly happening before us. We are able to feel and to observe ourselves feeling. While Fry was focusing on the experience of visual art, his description of purpose is precisely applicable to the writing of narrative fiction. The ultimate goal of storytelling is to share an experience or another world with a reader, and the focal point of that experience is the conjuring of emotion. This course will focus on the development of understanding and facility in the creation of emotion in fiction. We will address the basic structures of plot and conflict and move directly to the creation of work that will be presented in workshop. The discussion will focus on the writer's intent: their goals for the emotional and narrative experience for the reader.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In this class graduate students of across disciplines will get trained on various digital fabrication tools, then create experimental work— individually and in small, cross-disciplinary groups—inspired by the process itself, the materials and the potential for new and innovative applications. Readings about contemporary ideas and approaches to craft, digital fabrication, making, community-based maker labs, and their role and potential in Social justice and equity will complement our inquiry.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

In this experimental printmaking class students will combine multiple techniques to create, reshape, and transform work throughout the class. Students will learn hands-on printmaking techniques including monotype printing, relief printing in woodblock and linocut, acetate stencils, and the basics of hand-drawn silkscreen.

This class is meant to stretch the creative mind of participants; students will be asked to dramatically rethink and reshape images through unique collages or assemblages. Sustainable art making practices will be utilized as students adopt a zero-waste mindset where mistakes and imperfections will be embraced and amplified. Conceptually we will investigate the work of printmakers and collage artists such as Swoon, Brian Chippendale, Aleksander Rodchenko, Bisa Butler, and Nancy Spero.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Elective

This course is predicated on deep student focus on social engagement and the societal benefits attached to their studio work. Students will investigate and critique methodologies of contemporary, socially engaged artists to develop their own progressive work in order to question and shift traditionally narrow and restrictive paradigms in Illustration that preference and reward the hegemonic at the expense of the progressive, dissident, and critical work needed to advocate for the historically underrepresented. Collaborative projects with local artists, individuals and community organizations will be encouraged and supported to directly connect students with local communities. Students will be required to present self-driven work periodically in response to selected topics, readings, and community discussion.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course emphasizes the mining and contextualization of one's own work as a nexus for growth through the active, ongoing and evolving consideration of your own studio practice as a topic of study in itself. This work will spring from and shed light on your creative intuition, processes and outcomes in a way that will helps you to communicate your work to others through language. In turn, it is hoped this voicing of essential components of your work will help streamline your practice and expedite your artistic production.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

As a culmination of the MFA program, this intensive studio challenges students to design and craft a significant, topically-focused body of work. Although students may choose creative formats and media according to their own interests, they must publish thesis work produced in class. Publication through digital platforms (podcasts, websites, apps, etc.) will be coordinated with analog forms when possible and appropriate to the project. Together with the research and writing produced in ILLUS 606G Paradigms and Contexts: Publishing the Thesis and Beyond, a comprehensive body of work and a written thesis document will be produced.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $1,500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar supports the work of the Thesis Studio IV by providing a formal class setting in which to create written reflections on one's evolving studio thesis work as well as-more broadly-writings on illustration practice. Sessions will center on discussion of assigned readings as well as written responses to classmates' essays. These exercises will scaffold a more expansive documentation of their Studio Thesis Project, and to serve as a forum for discussion of critical writing about contemporary illustration practice that will support an essay to be contributed to the groups final publication.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

The artifacts of Japanese material culture, ranging in scale from ephemeral objects to monuments, will be considered for an interrogation into what it means for design to be a cultural product. We will travel to Kyoto, the historic cultural center and imperial capital of Japan for over a thousand years. Kyoto remains a premier hub for traditional Japanese culture, arts, and crafts. We will experience the wholistic art form of Japanese tea culture that blends architecture, calligraphy, painting, ceramics, textiles, lacquerware, metalwork, and woodwork. In Tokyo, we will visit design innovators and discuss the remarkable transnational influence of contemporary Japanese material culture.

Registration is not available in Workday. All students are required to remain in good academic standing in order to participate in the Wintersession travel course/studio. A minimum GPA of 2.50 is required. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Also in cases where Wintersession travel courses and studios do not reach student capacity, the course may be cancelled after the last day of Wintersession travel course registration. As such, all students are advised not to purchase flights for participation in Wintersession travel courses until the course is confirmed to run, which happens within the week after the final Wintersession travel course registration period.

Why do we continue to build when we know everything collapses eventually? How does the inevitability of decay affect what we build and create? What happens when what we have created begins to crumble? This course will study the physical, emotional, and aesthetic phenomenon of collapse (e.g. deferred maintenance, abandoned structures, ruins, kinetic demolition) through the lens of adaptive reuse and photography. Students will explore the importance of materials, time, history, and the various ways that society has addressed collapse, utilizing photography to document and explore these concepts.

Throughout the course, instructors will lead two visits to sites of local collapse in Providence, providing brief sociocultural histories to explore the implications of material choice, the passage of time, funding, etc. acting as barriers for reuse. Instructors will also provide reading and viewing materials (i.e. documentaries, photographic work, and precedent projects) to understand the concept of collapse, how it has been documented, what it can symbolize, and the way it affects community. Classroom discussions will cover foundational histories of adaptive reuse and how photography can be used to document processes of decay and renewal.

Coursework will include hands-on photography-based assignments, written reflections, renderings, and collaging to investigate the physical, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of collapse as it pertains to each participant’s individual practice. Additionally, students will gain a basic understanding of various photographic techniques, spatial representation skills, and visual narrative and storytelling methods.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

This course is open to undergraduate students only.

Elective

The course focuses on understanding the origin of museums and recognizing the influence that certain dominant design aesthetics, approaches, and narratives had on exhibitions. The museum architectural space and its interior exhibition design are never 'neutral' and the study of its history, codification, and exploitation are essential to rebalance and subvert the structural inequalities between Trouillot's agents (museums/institution), actors (curators/exhibit designers), and subject of museum narratives (artifacts/art/belongings). Through lectures, readings, and class debate, students will be encouraged to question how aesthetics impregnate exhibition environments through materials, light, colors, forms, and meanings; to acknowledge that architecture and exhibition design aesthetics are always politicized and that in the tiniest details of their morphology and their organization, museums have the power to validate, the power to corroborate, the power to include, and the deliberate power to silence. 

Major Elective: MDes ENE

Topics in Exhibition and Narrative Environments I is the first part in a year-long exploration of a fluid field in which exhibition occurs in museums as well as other environments. This seminar offers various approaches for that exploration and will provide the student insight into different aspects of exhibition: curatorial matters, experience design, narrative creation, graphic design, new media, user participation, installation, site specificity, production, etc. The content may change from year to year to include special projects. The content may change from year to year and may include theory, hands-on installation, curatorial matters, research, design planning, materials, new technology, time based interactions, and, of course, design of the narrative environment.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Exhibition and Narrative Environments

Topics in Exhibition and Narrative Environments II follows upon INTAR-2102 and continues the exploration of the principles of exhibition from curatorial matters, experience design, narrative creation, graphic design, new media, user participation, installation, site specificity, production, etc. Topics II will conclude with the selection of a potential Thesis subject.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Exhibition and Narrative Environments

This course focuses on the hands-on process of designing and constructing exhibitions. Students will explore the key elements of exhibition design, including spatial planning, material selection, lighting, signage and way-finding. They will also be exposed to standard fabrication and printing techniques commonly used within the industry.

Working collaboratively, students will design and build exhibits, moving from concept development to the physical installation. Emphasis is placed on real-world problem-solving, project management, and understanding the technical aspects of exhibition construction.

The course will culminate in fully realized exhibits giving the students opportunities to engage the public and share their work. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00

Elective