The Design BFA offers an intensive, studio-based experience that helps you develop advanced technical skills and a strong creative practice. During your first two years, you’ll build technical literacy, refine your craft and workflow skills, and develop a systems-thinking approach to design. In your final two years, you’ll shape your own path by taking advanced studio and Design and Visual Communication courses each semester. You’ll complete your degree by bringing together your technical expertise and critical thinking in a capstone project and solo exhibition that showcases your growth as a designer.

If you decide you’d like to move from the Design BA to the Design BFA, you’ll have the opportunity to apply through a portfolio review, typically held at the end of your sophomore year. Because the Design BFA is an intensive, studio-based degree that culminates in a solo gallery exhibition, admission is determined by a formal review of your portfolio by the design faculty.

The Design BA gives you the flexibility to combine visual communication with other academic interests across Seattle University. You’ll explore design theory alongside your chosen field of study while building your skills through hands-on workshops, thoughtful critique and creative collaboration in an inclusive environment. Along the way, you’ll develop the visual literacy, critical thinking and problem-solving skills to address today’s communication challenges with confidence and purpose.

If your interests evolve and you’d like a more flexible, interdisciplinary academic experience, you can transition from the Design BFA to the Design BA at any time by working with your academic advisor.

If you’re pursuing a different major, a Design Minor is a great way to strengthen your creative and visual communication skills. You can also choose the Interaction (UX) Design Minor to explore user experience design and build the skills needed to create thoughtful, engaging digital experiences.

• Design Fundamentals: Cornish curriculum balances analog and digital workflows, typography, image-making, composition, narrative development, motion design, drawing and interaction.
• Project-Based Curriculum: Through individual and collaborative portfolios, you will create brand identities, print and digital publishing (books, magazines, and zines), packaging, websites, mobile apps, record covers, experience design, exhibition spaces and targeted graphics for social activism.
• Critical Studies: Design history, theory and ethics are the backbone of the Cornish program. Unlike many design programs, our curriculum is shaped around intellectual critique. You will practice making informed, intentional, conceptual and aesthetic choices. Our lectures, academic research and guest workshops introduce and critique the stories and theories of design’s past, offering you the tools to think critically about its present.
• Social Engagement & Activism: You are encouraged to look outward, engaging with questions of social responsibility, persuasion, and propaganda while working directly with local, community-identified initiatives.
• Professional Practices: Cornish focuses on career readiness and strategic portfolio curation. In our Design Agency course, you prepare your post-Cornish plan—conducting targeted industry research, sharpening your unique visual identity and formatting a portfolio tailored to the exact kind of work you want to pursue.
• Industry Partnerships: Design is a listening art before it is a problem-solving art. To cultivate authentic client relationship skills, you will engage in collaborative studios, local internships, site visits and industry partnerships that foster lifelong professional networks.
• Synthetic Technologies & Spatial Systems: As technology evolves, our instructional opportunities evolve with it. You will have access to experimental coursework in co-authoring with synthetic intelligence, building spatial simulations and mastering generative workflows.
• Printmaking & Traditional Media: Cornish celebrates hybridity. You will have the opportunity to combine printmaking, bookbinding, letterpress, laser cutting and 3D printing with digital layouts and risograph production to create rich, mixed-media design.

Design BFA Learning Outcomes

• Produce a design that meets the needs of a specific audience.
• Synthesize theory and research to inform the design process and its outcomes.
• Demonstrate analog and digital skills at current professional standards.
• Devise human-centered, equitable design solutions for a community partner.
• Compile a capstone project, a capstone exhibition and professional design portfolio suitable for your chosen career path.

Design BA Learning Outcomes

• Produce a design that meets the needs of a specific audience.
• Synthesize theory and research to inform the design process and its outcomes.
• Demonstrate analog and digital skills at current professional standards.
• Devise human-centered, equitable design solutions for a community partner.
• Compile a professional design portfolio suitable for your chosen career path.