The Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s Design & Illustration Department prepares students for successful careers in both design and illustration, empowering them to become leaders in their respective fields. Students learn to create memorable user experiences, communicate effectively to solve complex problems, and use their visual voices to open minds and address social and cultural issues.
Mentored by a passionate, award-winning faculty, majors experiment and create original, human-centered, and research-driven concepts across all areas of visual design and illustration, including branding, typography, packaging, digital media, publishing, entrepreneurship, product design, virtual reality, and experiential design.
Students develop a digital literacy that fuels their ability to apply existing and emerging technologies in their work – learning how to learn the ever-expanding software applications that power the fields – and gain a thorough understanding of the changing nature of design and illustration, and the integral role that technology plays in them. All students engage with the core software applications (Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop,) as well as a wide variety of software for illustration, prototyping, animation, motion graphics, typeface design, 3D modeling, coding, website design, augmented reality, and game development.
Students also find and hone their unique voices and have opportunities to wield their design and illustration expertise across Philadelphia—a city that’s a living laboratory for design-driven solutions and host to a booming creative community with one of the largest national chapters of the AIGA: the professional association for design. Beyond Philadelphia, students can showcase their talents and connect with the design world on a national and international level. This allows them to gain recognition, collaborate with professionals worldwide, and stay at the forefront of global design trends.
Students and faculty have been featured in numerous national and international design and illustration competitions and publications and have won many awards and honors. Leveraging robust faculty and alumni networks, graduates find employment in studios and agencies around the country as well as abroad in areas that include:
- Design studios
- User-experience (UX) and user-interface (UI) design firms
- Publishing companies
- Streaming platforms and network television
- Music industry and digital services
- Motion and experiential design studios
- Packaging design
- Fortune 500 technology companies
- Advertising agencies
- Illustration entrepreneurs and start-up design businesses
Some of the companies that our students have worked at include Anheuser-Busch; Chronicle Books; Google; Hallmark; MTV; The New York Times; Nickelodeon; Pentagram; the Philadelphia Flyers (NHL); Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Phillies (MLB); Simon and Schuster; Spotify; URBN; and Vanguard.
Resources
- Access to Adobe Creative Cloud and other industry-standard software.
- Support available to experiment with emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, blended reality and video game design.
- A dedicated printing and production studio; a large, open space for interdisciplinary collaborative projects; individual work stations for making (MFA); and flat files for storage (MFA)
- Access to the Tyler digital fabrication studio and additional printing facilities
- Access to the specialists, technology and resources of Temple—a leading public research university
Visiting artists and lecturers
The Design & Illustration Department brings leading designers, illustrators and thinkers to enrich the student experience, providing workshops, presentations and one-on-one interactions for students. Over the years Tyler has hosted Louise Fili, Josh Goldblum, Jessica Hische, Brad Johnson, Zach Lieberman, Cheryl Miller, Andrea Pippins, Robynne Raye, Sadie Red Wing, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, David Dylan Thomas, Roberto de Vicq, James Victore and Zipeng Zhu.
An Entrepreneurial Spirit
The most notable graphic designers and illustrators today all have one thing in common—drive. In the Design and Illustration Department, students experience creative agency and entrepreneurship by bringing their ideas to market and working directly with clients. Semester-long experiences provide opportunities for hands-on problem solving and real-world projects.
In the past, students have created their own brands and sold their own products, in addition to collaborating with companies and organizations like Boldfaced Goods, Career Wardrobe, Genuine Fred, Hallmark, Temple Law, Tyler’s Alumni Association, and Victory Brewing Company.
