Class sessions
Four Six Five will meet twice a week in 75-minute, in-person sessions throughout the Fall 2025 semester. I believe you will find in-person sessions a great benefit for our course — J465 depends heavily on your ability to learn to collaborate effectively, and though all of your projects will be individual, many of our creative exercises will involve you working in small teams (usually pairs).
Each of the next 15 weeks is themed around a particular design topic (see the Calendar page for specifics). Each week will feature assignments that you can track on the Modules page of Canvas. Tips assignments will help you build skills, and Creative Exercises will provide you with relevant practice for the major projects. Completion of the Tips and Exercises assignments will determine your Participation score for the class; the rest of your final grade will be determined by the quality of your work on our five major projects. Here is how our work will progress:
Tuesdays: The first part of our week, once we get into the flow of the class, will usually feature a critique of our creative work from the previous week. We will then review the “Tip” assignment for the week, if it deadlines on the Tuesday. The second half of Tuesday’s classes will usually feature a lecture to introduce that week’s concepts. The lecture will usually conclude with a creative prompt — not a graded project, but an exercise that will help you build skills related to various formats and purposes related to graphic design.
Thursdays: Often, the second session of the week will feel more like a workshop, where you will be working on that week’s creative exercise. Thursdays will often feature a shorter lecture portion, too, pushing forward with important considerations for each week’s theme.
Handouts: We will use weekly handouts in class for Tips, designed to build skills in design software. Handouts will usually be printed out, and will be available in Canvas > Files > Handouts > Tips. There are also handouts for each week’s exercise prompt, as well as a series of “How To” and general reference handouts.
Videos: Our class will also feature a series of tutorial videos for the Tips assigments and for the various “How To” handouts, including how to post to our class website, how to tackle the second week’s creative exercise, how to publish your portfolio site and how to use Adobe AfterEffects. The videos will be available at the beginning of the week (Sunday) with links to our YouTube channel in the Modules.
The work we’ll do
Four (or five, depending how you count) units will make up J465 this semester. We will begin the semester with some basic drawing exercises, then move on to beginning the work on our semester-long Portfolio project. We will then move into branding, then illustration, then layout, then animation. Over the course of the semester, you will accumulate a healthy portfolio of creative, original work from your Projects and Exercises.
The projects make up the majority of your grade in J465. The fifth “project” is your ongoing, personal J465 website, which we will begin in Week Three. You will design, code, publish (via Pages) and maintain your J465 portfolio over the course of the semester, adding your creative work as you go. In addition to showcasing your work in J465, with both exercises and projects, your site will feature your own design touches, including a header, background, typography, structure and colors.
Below is a list of the project work for Fall 2025. You will be able to see assignment prompts, as handouts, on Canvas, and we will review each project assignment thoroughly in lecture.
Five projects
Thework you will turn in for a grade will be all your own. Each project is equally weighted, and you will for the most part work on your projects outside of class time. Each project assignment will require a post to our class website where you will explain your design decisions and analyze the outcome of your efforts.
Percentage value of each project:
For the first (graded) project, you will create a brand name for an imagined publishing house that will “carry” all your work for this course. You will design logo variations, a color scheme and typographic style. Additionally, you will prepare a brief mission statement describing your organization’s aims, its audience and content, as well as a design rationale describing the meaning behind the logo design. The remaining project prompts are very broad, giving you a lot of leeway to specialize in a certain kind of style and look for the output of your “publishing company.”
Your next two projects involve opening up your creativity and drawing abilities. You will create a poster that represents your interpretation of the influence of graphic designer of your choice — it can be anyone, living or dead, individual or collective, whose style you especially admire. Later, you will create a centerpiece illustration and layout for your “publication” based on your choice from among a series of stories — or selecting something you yourself have written.
As we transition from static to motion design, you will be creating a short animation of your logo design using Adobe After Effects.
The final project will represent a culmination of all that you have learned and produced in this course. You will present your work (including the four previous projects as well as a selection of your in-class exercises) as a web portfolio, which you will begin in Week 3 and build over the course of the semester. We will “check in” on occasion during the semester to ensure your website is progressing as it should. Some of you will have vast experience in web design, but for some of you, this will be an entirely new skill with unique challenges. Please be sure to reach out to me if you need additional help with this aspect of our class.
Weekly Tips and Exercises
Aligning with our weekly thrmes, you will be completing a series of assignments to help you build skills and gain experience in designing for specific purposes and with specific software. These assignments, which will determine your “Participation” score, are divided into “Tips” and “Exercises.”
Tips: In most weeks, you will be responsible for completing a short “Tip” assignment (and sometimes two) that will help you build skills in the relevant software. There are handouts and videos available for all the Tips, and in many cases, there will also be material for you to download from Canvas to work with to complete the assignments. You will complete most of the Tips outside of class, often in advance of our Tuesday sessions (though some Tips will deadline on Thursday). You should arrive in class having completed the Tip assignment for that week. We will briefly review the assignment at the beginning of class, but given that we have just 75 short minutes for our meetings, most of the “Tip” work will need to take place outside the classroom.
Creative Exercises: These assignments, which make up the majority of your Participation grade, are more open-ended and have greater creative leeway than the Tips. Each Exercise has a handout prompt, and often some course material to work with, but usually not accompanying videos. How you choose to develop your designs for these assignments is up to you. These will not be graded per se, but we will be spending class time critiquing the work, and I will often provide feedback in either spoken or written form. Some of the exercises, especially later in the semester, will be collaborative, working in small teams (usually pairs).