In honor of February being Black History Month, our Upper School students in the Graphic Design and Digital Art classes used Photoshop to create digital art pieces that reflect their personal interpretations of black history. Their work is on display through the end of the month at the Fulton County Northside Branch Library (3295 Northside Parkway NW, Atlanta, GA 30327) as well as in the Middle and Upper School lobbies. Please stop by one of these venues to peruse their work!
About the Graphic Design and Digital Art classes:
Our students learn the skill of combining text and pictures with art and technology to communicate ideas and use these skills to produce many promotional pieces for our Whitefield events. Each class operates as a working studio with real life clients. They learn to produce artistic creations using digital technology and use these works for exhibit both on and off campus and for their 2D Design AP portfolios. They receive instruction in Publisher, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator and gain experience creating a brand and a website, which are skills they can list for college and job resumes. The Advanced Graphic Design class also learns to design architecture in SketchUp, print 3D objects they create in TinkerCad, create art on a Graphics Tablet, create a video on an iPad, and screenprint a T-shirt using an exposure unit.
Currently at Whitefield, our technology course offerings include Digital Art, Graphic Design, Advanced Graphic Design, Photography, Communications, Theater Tech, Computer Science, Yearbook I and II, AP 2D Design, and AP Computer Science. With each class, we are working to prepare our Whitefield students to succeed and be innovators in our technology-driven world!
What is Graphic Design?
(excerpt from AIGA Career Guide)
Suppose you want to announce or sell something, amuse or persuade someone, explain a complicated system, or demonstrate a process. In other words, you have a message you want to communicate. How do you “send” it? You could tell people one by one or broadcast by radio or loudspeaker. That’s verbal communication. But if you use any visual medium at all—if you make a poster; type a letter; create a business logo, a magazine ad, or an album cover; even make a computer printout—you are using a form of visual communication called graphic design.
Graphic designers work with drawn, painted, photographed, or computer-generated images (pictures), but they also design the letterforms that make up various typefaces found in movie credits and TV ads; in books, magazines, and menus; and even on computer screens. Designers create, choose, and organize these elements—typography, images, and the so-called “white space” around them—to communicate a message. Graphic design is a part of your daily life. From humble things like gum wrappers to huge things like billboards to the T-shirt you’re wearing, graphic design informs, persuades, organizes, stimulates, locates, identifies, attracts attention and provides pleasure.