Graphic Design

Graphic design and graphic illustration are closely related disciplines that develop distinct but complementary visual skills. Graphic design is concerned with communication through typography, layout, and image, shaping how information and ideas are presented across print, digital, and environmental media. Graphic illustration focuses more specifically on image-making and visual storytelling, developing the capacity to create original imagery that communicates, entertains, or expresses ideas in ways that pure typography or layout cannot.

Both require strong visual thinking, technical skill, and an understanding of how audiences respond to visual communication.

At the University of Suffolk, this part-time programme is taught alongside the Graphic Design degree, allowing you to develop your creative skills in the illustration pathway with the flexibility to respond to where your interests and strengths lie. You will work across both typographic and image-based disciplines, developing your creative direction and building the technical and conceptual range that professional practice demands. The shared teaching structure means that you are not locked into a single specialism from the start, and you can develop your approach in response to your own developing practice and ambitions.

You will build a portfolio that demonstrates your visual thinking, your technical range, and your capacity to develop briefs from concept to realised work. Critical and contextual study runs alongside studio practice, giving you the historical and theoretical frameworks to situate your own work within the broader landscape of design and illustration.

Graduates from graphic illustration and design programmes work as illustrators, graphic designers, brand designers, concept artists, art directors, motion designers, and visual communicators across publishing, advertising, the digital sector, games, animation, and the cultural sector. Many graduates also develop freelance practices or build independent creative careers. The flexibility of the programme at Suffolk means that your final qualification reflects the creative direction you have genuinely pursued.