I was hired to teach Intro to Production Design (MGD 1012) at Front Range Community College during the 2022 Fall semester. This was a wonderful opportunity to teach InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop as a complete production ecosystem! For this course, I was also given the privilege of designing a new “course shell,” complete with graphics, assignments and their rubrics, and assigned readings.
Prior instructors had created and built upon an existing course shell, which I used as a guide for setting up my own. A set of learning goals was already in place for the course, and I built the new course shell with an eye to ensuring each of those was well addressed.
For each lecture, I designed a few slides to accompany what I was talking about or demonstrating during class. The presentation deck below was made for the first class session, and demonstrates a bit of the structure of the class overall. Class sessions would begin with an exercise, where students would follow along with a demonstration of a single technique or simple set of techniques before submitting their work. Over the course of the class, each student also produced multiple high-effort projects (to be worked on in between classes), and a personal icon library.
The below four images are samples of the reusable assets I created to unify the look & feel of the course shell. These would be used across presentation slides for my lectures, as bases for in-class technique demos, or as banners and similar within MyCourses D2L (the LMS platform FRCC used at the time).
The following four images are screenshots of Adobe Illustrator with relevant tool panels open, indicating what the contents of each progress check for our third class project should look like. I found that providing in-progress screenshots like these well prior to each assignment’s due date helped students understand expectations for each deliverable more clearly.
Below is a color systems infographic I created as reference material for my students:
This last image is an example of our third project’s final digital deliverable (a poster, in two versions optimized for print and for digital) provided to students to give them a few cues on what their final piece could look like.
All materials shown on this page are copyright FRCC Westminster, 2022.