Custom designing your future career

Starting this fall, Prague College will offer students a chance to earn a bachelor's degree in graphic design.

Known for its hands-on approach to teaching, Prague College has been offering a two-year graphic design program since 2005. Completing the program earns students a higher national diploma (HND), the British equivalent of an associate's degree, but students must still enroll in another school if they are interested in earning a bachelor's degree. Soon, however, they won't have to do that.

The new three-year graphic design program, beginning in October, will be geared toward first-time and continuing students and will cost EU nationals roughly 297,000 Kč ($14,000) to complete. Students from outside the European Union will pay a bit more. The program is one of the few options in the region, which Jeff Buehler, the head of teaching at Prague College, sees as an advantage.

"The HND is an excellent program. It's really practical, hands-on training in the field, and if you have the HND, it's really enough to go out and have a career," Buehler says. "But, for a lot people, the bachelor's degree is something for their development in the future, something for their CV."

Prague College is working with the University of Teesside in England to jump start its new graphic design program. This is the same university that Prague College partners with on its business degree offerings. The new graphic design program will also be accredited by Edexcel, one of Britain's largest accreditation agencies.

A lot of Prague College students work as freelance designers while earning their degree. Companies that Prague College has worked with include Monster Worldwide, Ogilvy, Tesco and Siemens. Upon graduating, most students seamlessly transition into the workplace, according to Buehler.

While it is difficult to predict what sorts of degrees the financial crisis may affect in the graphic design field, it seems that the graduates from Prague College don't have a lot to worry about.

"I can only go by what we've experienced so far: that our students ... are getting design work, and our first groups of students have all basically been working in design since they graduated with the HND," Buehler says. "Because of the lack of design training in this country, our students have a great chance of getting design jobs, because there just [aren't] a lot out there."

There's a lack of comparable programs in Prague. Most schools offer classical fine arts programs that are highly selective and more traditional than the typical graphic design program, Buehler points out.

Prague College student Klára Zápotocká, who's majoring in graphic design, agrees.

"State art schools in Prague are really specific, and a lot of people fail their final exams. … It is hard to get in; they have some 200 applicants for three spots," she says.

Buehler is keenly aware of the situation.

"Most of the designers who go to advertising agencies or studios here study art or art history," he says. "Our program is … to train them in graphic design, which is quite different."

The school walks students through numerous application trainings and also gives them insight and firsthand knowledge on what to expect when working in a professional studio environment with real clients.

Currently, students are required to finish their HND in Britain if they are interested in earning their bachelor's degree. However, with the new three-year program, a student's final year can be spent either in Prague or in the United Kingdom.

Zápotocká, for one, is glad that she won't have to move.

"I will take the degree program here. I have a flat here, and friends. It's really great that I can do it in Prague, because the cost of living in the U.K. is high," she says.

While the two-year HND program focuses on the acquisition of software skills, typography, idea generation and drawing, among other things, the additional third year that will be offered in the fall is all about going into the depths of design.

"In the BA, more complex mathematical grid models and organic grids will be introduced, as a way for [students] to push their layout design," says Simon Gray, the program leader for Prague College's graphic design program. "We will also have talks on business practice, trends in design, organizational methods, job roles [and] research models. ... The big difference is that it is more up to the students what they take out of the sessions."

The third year of the graphic design program is organized into four modules: professional communication, a six-month major project, another module dealing with live projects and competitions and, lastly, a dissertation.

The key, Gray says, is to get students out into the real world.

"For instance, we would take a theme such as recycling in the local community, and the students would work on how to improve communication, both on the recycling bins themselves [and] also on local communication through fliers and other means," Gray says. "This would help to involve the college in useful local activity and also give the school a design objective and specialization."

It's this kind of hands-on approach to learning that attracts students to the school.

"I found [out] about the college online, and I decided to move to Prague … I didn't know anything about Prague until I moved here," says Dmytro Strapchen, a Russian student currently studying graphic design and considering enrolling in the bachelor's program later this year.

"At the end of the [first] semester, I felt that I got to a new level of understanding design," Strapchen says.

Sounds like he is on the right track.

Sarah Borufka can be reached at
sborufka@praguepost.com