Cal Poly SLO

The Art of Photography is a two-week deep dive into the many facets of the photography field. Students will work with historical processes like cyanotypes and large format cameras as well as modern digital cameras, printers, and professional studio lighting. Through technical activities, students will learn new, expressive ways to create images. At the end of the session, students will have a portfolio of new images, but more importantly, new ideas for continuing their own photographic journey.

In this course, students interested in designing a brand will get a chance to use programs like Adobe Creative to translate their big branding ideas into a physical product that will entice consumers to engage with their new brand.

Aspiring brand designers will learn how to compose a style guide for their new brand.

Once the brand has been conceived and designed, students will get to work printing, converting, and finishing their design to make into something tangible that their target consumers will get to interact with in the marketplace.

Throughout this course, students will learn how to recognize elements associated with a brand’s graphical and physical parts, think Nike’s swoosh, Supreme’s red rectangular logo, and McDonald’s golden arches.

Have you ever considered the impact films have on shaping ideas about identity within society or how culture influences characters in film? In this course we will approach film studies and critique from the relateable lens of teen cinema. From Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Mean Girls (2004), teen films have consistently been a popular and profitable genre. Teen films both idealize and demonize adolescents, while mirroring and shaping societal expectations and fears about teen identities and roles. We will take a critical cultural studies approach to the analysis of representations of teens in film and consider the U.S. cultural values these images illuminate. This course provides an introductory survey of teen films as a distinct art form that has the ability to reflect, critique, reshape, and impact society and culture. We will critically examine and analyze the teen film genre and its relationship to various aspects of society and culture (i.e., race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and and its relationship to various aspects of society and culture (i.e., race, class, gender, ability, sexuality).

Are you interested in the impact and design of digital public relations and advertising storytelling? From video commercials, content marketing, social media advertising, influencer marketing, to billboards and sponsorships — advertising and public relations messages are everywhere! This course is designed to provide students with an understanding about the marketplace of attention and create effective narratives of their own creation. Students will be exposed to higher level thinking as media consumers and have the opportunity to test their theories by designing and producing a strategic communications campaign, a video commercial, and social media content for a fictional client.

Interested in graphic design and understanding what it takes to move a great idea to reality? In this class students will develop skills and utilize Principles of Design through a hands-on project where they will apply a sequence of graphic communication industry processes and procedures in producing designs and products for a fictitious business or organization that they define. Students will design and create a logo using Adobe Illustrator and write a Creative Brief that outlines client background, objectives, competitors, and key message. They will construct a Style Guide that describes branding- colors, typography, and imagery.

A critical exploration into the roots, development, and enduring impact of Hip-Hop for people across the globe. Hip-Hop, as both politicized art form and sociocultural movement, can expose common-sense ideas and practices central to racism, sexism, homophobia, settler-colonialism, and systemic poverty. Upon surveying a critical history of how and why Hip-Hop emerged fifty years ago, we will explore how Hip-Hop lends marginalized communities a voice to express a politics of radical, youth empowerment.

Students will embark on a journey of innovation and entrepreneurship, prioritizing hands-on experience and real-world application over theoretical learning. They will form teams of 3-4 and compete to develop innovative dairy sector products. They will engage in the innovation process and receive feedback from the industry sponsor, the California Milk Advisory Board. At the conclusion of the course, winners will be announced, and all students will receive certificates in recognition of their efforts. This immersive experience not only fosters teamwork, but also underscores effective communication in a professional context. This course offers a unique opportunity to combine innovation and entrepreneurial skills for a tangible impact on business development.

This course is THE course for any student who is interested in starting their own online business. In this course students will learn how to create a campaign to market products in any industry of their choosing. In this marketing bootcamp, students will cover all of the core concepts of marketing. They will begin with the creative process (ideation), discuss all of the various distribution channels to market their product, create their consumer persona, determine what the Total Available Market (TAM) size is for their business, and perform the necessary targeting analytics. Their work will culminate in producing some highly personalized marketing materials using Adobe InDesign and variable data/personalization campaigns.

As the 2024 presidential election kicks into high gear this summer, students will get a hands-on education into how elections are actually conducted in the U.S. from the campaign perspective and an
administrative and constitutional lens. This course will be a great opportunity for students to make connections for possible jobs and internships in the political world as well as in local government. It will allow them to survey the field to explore their own interests while also allowing them to become better engaged and informed participants in democracy.

Have you ever wondered how to transfer one of your favorite animation characters into stickers, magnets, or tote bags? Do you wonder what makes the dashboard glow in the car? Students with an interest in graphic design and printing may wonder how colors are printed on t-shirts or how a large-scale Star Wars vinyl wrap was applied to a building or bus?

This course will link a student’s daily experience with tangible printing and graphic embellishments. By the end of this class, students will be comfortable designing for digital printing technologies, and will produce a laser cut LED lamp, notepads with varnish sleek foil stamp, a t-shirt, a canvas poster, a bag or hat, and buttons or stickers using their own designs. In this course, students will experience a wholistic experience of the design and reproduction workflow from ideation, prototyping, iteration, and production.

Storyboarding has long been used to visually plan and compose the final camera shots for film, animation, commercials, and video games. In this exciting course, students will learn the fundamentals of storyboarding, as well as the art of camera framing, camera angles, and camera movement. While reading and interpreting scripts, students will begin to quickly visualize a sequential series of illustrations to describe a narrative. Students will practice drawing basic figures, environments, and props to use for their storyboard. In the final days of the class, students will craft a 24+ panel storyboard, and present this in the form of a slideshow and animatic movie.

People are viewing their digital media content across a multitude of platforms these days. Today’s UX designers are trained to understand how to design webpages and digital media to easily adapt to the wide variety of devices and platforms that exist in the marketplace. With a focus on a more inclusive mobile user experience, students will learn current technologies and production tools used for the mobile user interface design and prototyping that will expand accessibility for a diverse end-user audience. Students will also learn to apply design principles and ethical considerations to the decision-making process to design the best user experience for mobile digital products. They will spend a majority of their time in the Cal Poly labs using Figma while creating mock mobile web pages that easily function across multiple device platforms.

As the researcher and scholar Mark Rawlinson puts it: “Visual culture – art, advertising, architecture, cinema, television, cartography, video, the internet, and images of science – has shaped American national identity more than that of any other country.” This course will explore the power of visual communication in today’s society while teaching students to wield that power in creative and effective ways. After reviewing the basic principles of visual communication and graphic design, students will apply them to an assortment of visuals that they create – from logos, to web graphics to artificial-intelligence generated artwork. Visual communication is a life skill!

With so many different platforms on which audiences are able to view websites, it’s important for aspiring web designers to consider how to create responsive and accessible websites. In this course, students will use a variety of web development production tools and processes, following the best practices in the industry, to build websites that can be used for as many people as possible, using as many devices as possible without modification.