Design Studio
Case study · Teaching/Program Design
Real clients, real briefs, real deadlines. For a decade this course sent students into live work from campus partners and had them ship it, from a 90-foot mural to motion, print, publications, and an app. It outgrew the course, won a grant, and now runs as a paid studio, four students at $18 an hour.
Goal
Put students in front of actual clients and actual deadlines, so they graduate with professional work rather than class assignments. Every project on this page was made inside the course.
The design of it is the point. In an ordinary assignment the instructor is the audience, so the student is really performing for a grade. Here a client is waiting, the work goes out into the world, and the student has to defend the choices to someone who did not assign them. The assessment is the professional task. There is no way to fake it, no way to paste it, and nothing a model can hand back that a client will accept.
Audience
Students first, and not only design students. The studio is a multidisciplinary group: film, photography, animation, graphic design, and sound design students, who we bring in often on the videos, because a real client brief rarely stays inside one discipline. Campus partners second: the offices, programs, and committees who need this work and have no creative staff of their own. Both are real, and neither is a simulation of the other.
Process
Students work in teams, and one student on each team serves as the project manager. That student writes the design brief and the timeline, interfaces directly with the client, and keeps the team on track. Not the instructor. The brief names the client, the goal, the approach, and what the client actually needs; the timeline carries the proof cycles, the client approval gates, and the delivery date. Teams run in Basecamp, Slack, Miro, and Discord.
While it ran as a course, the instructor’s job was to decide which projects the studio took on and in what order, and to hold the standard. The students’ job was to run it. A student who has written a brief, held a timeline, and told a client that a date is slipping has done something no assignment can simulate.
The boards below are the working evidence, not a reconstruction. Both were built by student teams while the work was live.
So they leave with two things, not one. They leave with the work, and they leave having practiced real project management methodology: scoping against a client’s actual need, sequencing a build, running a proof and approval cycle, tracking a team, and delivering on a date they committed to in writing. Designers are rarely taught any of it, and it is the thing that decides who gets to lead.
Which is why it belongs on a student’s resume as an internship, because that is what it is. They had a client, a brief, a deadline, and a deliverable that shipped. The only difference between this and an internship is that it happened to be worth credit.
The model outgrew the course. We wrote a grant, it came through, and the class no longer runs, because it did not need to. The studio now employs four paid students each semester, drawn from film, photography, animation, and design, doing client work for a wage instead of for credit. Students who want the experience without the job take an internship placed with a client instead.
A film faculty member runs it now. It is advised by three faculty, one from animation, one from photography, and one from design. Handing it off was the point. The work students made inside the course is what made the case for funding it, and it outlasted any one instructor.
Technology
- Student teams running on Basecamp, Slack, Miro, and Discord, with one student per team acting as project manager over the brief, the timeline, and direct client contact.
- Adobe Creative Cloud across the work: motion, print, publications, illustration, and interface design.
- A brief-and-timeline workflow with proof cycles, client approval gates, and a committed delivery date, the same project-management methodology a professional studio runs on.
Outcomes
What the studio produced is a body of real, shipped client work across motion, print, publications, illustration, murals, and interface design, made for campus partners who had no creative staff of their own. The pieces below are a selection, followed by the fuller client list.
Selected client work
Nobody knew the free-textbook filter existed
Client · Open Educational Resources Committee
Open Maricopa, formerly Maricopa Millions, is a district program created by district colleagues. It funds faculty to build their own course materials instead of assigning a textbook, and it has saved students more than $36 million. Students see it as a filter in course search, and that is the problem: a filter nobody notices saves nobody anything, which makes this an adoption problem rather than an engineering one. The college’s OER committee brought it to the studio as a brief with one hard constraint. The piece had to play on Gaucho TV and the screens in the student union, and those screens have no sound. It had to be understood by someone walking past, with the audio off, who was not planning to pay attention. That constraint is what made it a design problem: no voiceover to lean on, so the motion, the characters, and the interface had to carry all of it.
Produced by Digital Media Arts students under faculty direction. The filters are live in Maricopa Find a Class.
A day in the life, told by the people living it
Client · Digital Media Arts recruitment
A prospective student does not want a brochure, and the only people who can honestly describe the life are the ones living it, so the students made the recruitment piece themselves. It opens on an alarm clock and follows a Digital Media Arts student through an ordinary day, across campus, into class, into the work. It is live action with hand-drawn animation laid over it, which is harder than either one alone, and it is both narrated and captioned, so it holds up with the sound off and for a viewer who needs the text. Nobody required that. It is the same instinct every brief here demands: decide who you are actually talking to, then meet them where they are.
Produced by Digital Media Arts students under faculty direction.
More client work
The range is the point. These are unrelated departments with unrelated problems, none of whom have a designer of their own. Each one arrived as a brief and left as a delivered thing.
The client list
- Fitness and Wellness
- A personal-training app designed with personal-training students as the subject-matter experts, so the exercise science came from the people studying it
- Engineering
- A 3D rendering of a solar car, made to help the program raise the funding to build it
- Open Educational Resources Committee
- An animated explainer built to be understood with the sound off, on campus screens
- International Education Center
- An orientation booklet and presentation for students arriving from other countries
- the college Theatre
- Posters for plays and productions across the season, a new brief every few weeks
- Verve Dance Company
- Posters, programs, and promotional material for the company
- The Library
- An illustrated map of the building, made for Halloween
- The Astronomy Festival
- A commemorative pin, a designed object people kept
- Science Olympiad
- Event apparel, a client that came back year after year
- Odyssey of the Mind
- Apparel for the creative problem-solving competition
- Online Psychology course
- A set of achievement badges for the course
- the college Animation and Film Festivals
- Title bumpers for every festival
- Spanish, a prototype
- A Mayan-inspired interface for an online Spanish course, a simulation where students enter a Mayan village and complete tasks in Spanish. A prototype, never put into production.
- Biology, a prototype
- A game for learning the scientific process using the animals and plants of the Sonoran Desert. A prototype, never put into production.
- District Office, student services
- A marketing video for the Maricopa district’s student-services office, made for students who could not find childcare or emergency funds, or did not know where to turn for help. An early cut survives. It is the same problem the district student-journey study and CopaMigo take on now, a decade later.
- Marketing and Recruitment
- An interactive campus-tour interface, prototyped by a student whom Marketing then hired; it grew into the college’s current 3D campus map.
More across the campus
Gaucho Talk convocation motion graphics for Administration · set designs for The Heidi Chronicles and a Southwest Horn Festival campaign for Performing Arts · title graphics for two student-run TV news magazines in Digital Cinema Arts · recruitment and program brochures for Athletics and Sports Management · a poster and brochure for Philosophy and Religious Studies · artwork for The Voice in Journalism · event identity and signage for the program’s own Showcase · apparel for Human Resources.
Status
Now a grant-funded paid studio. After a decade as a course, it runs as paid student work, four students each semester at $18 an hour, advised by three faculty across film, photography, and design, with an internship placement as the alternate path. The work shown is real, shipped, and student-run; the course made the case that funded the studio, and the model outlasted any one instructor.