Digital Art and Design

The Digital Art and Design program inspires innovative thinking and making at the intersection of graphic design, animation, digital 3D, illustration, interaction design, and sound. Through collaborative projects and individual creative expressions, you’ll dive deep into industry-standard digital workflows, enabling you to seamlessly adapt to an ever-shifting media landscape.

You’ll also round your education out with a wide range of general education and art history courses that will stimulate your curiosity, broaden your perspective, and inspire new creative expressions. KCAD’s flexible General Education Pathways model empowers you to direct your learning by exploring topics you find most engaging and relevant.

As a student in the Digital Art and Design program, you will become a forward-thinking artist and/or designer capable of creating dynamic and engaging narratives and user experiences across a number of different disciplines and media. You’ll cultivate critical thinking skills, collaborative processes, and a broad world view, as well as intangible skills such as a keen sense of story and a fearless approach to art and design technologies.

In addition, you’ll graduate with a robust portfolio of work in one of two focus areas:

• Multimedia Design - including interaction design for the web, apps, virtual reality, and the internet of things as well as video and motion design animation.
• Entertainment Art - including 2D animation, 3D game art, and concept and production art for games and animation.

In KCAD’s Digital Art and Design program, you’ll participate in collaborative projects with area gaming and multimedia companies as well as educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. Examples of previous collaborative projects can be found at epicsite.org, where we house our student-created EPIC (Engaging Production Inspiring Classrooms & Community) educational and informational media, made available for free to K-12 teachers and non-profit organizations across the country.

The Digital Art and Design program at KCAD fosters a tight-knit community centered around our physical learning spaces, the program’s Facebook page, and the student-designed website, DAD Hub. There, students share their work with each other, gain valuable industry perspective by watching alumni interviews and reading industry reports, and absorb massive amounts of information from KCAD’s Digital Learning Center, a dynamic collection of resources including software tutorials, technical walk-throughs, and more.

Digital artists and designers participate in creative, fast-paced work environments. As a Digital Art and Design student, you’ll graduate with a versatile skill set that can be applied in a diverse array of fields, including entertainment, advertising, retail, information, and education.

Through the program’s in-depth exploration of a number of different focus areas, you’ll be able to pursue career paths in areas such as 2D animation, 3D game art, visual development, interaction design, and motion design. What’s more, you’ll be able to approach your career search in terms of roles and skills rather than job titles, as new job titles in this quickly evolving field are emerging every year. As a Digital Art and Design graduate, you’ll adopt a continual state of lifelong learning and be ready to tackle new techniques, software, and hardware as well as employ a keen sense of story, communication, collaboration and creativity.