DNSEP Design specalizing in multimedia graphic design

Multimedia graphic design second cycle in Pau

The Multimedia Graphic Design program enables students to develop their own artistic sensibility in the fields of graphic design and new media. It also teaches them to respect the constraints of their future professional activity.

The 2nd cycle concludes in the fifth year with the award of the DNSEP, a Master’s degree (Bac +5). Comprising years 4 and 5, it is designed to structure and affirm high-level personal research.

Conceived as a genuine “made-to-measure” accompaniment program, the pedagogy deployed alternates learning and personalized follow-up. Seminars, workshops and individual and group meetings structure 2nd cycle teaching. Knowledge is imparted both through the common core of courses offered to students in the year or cycle, and through the hubs that function as knowledge communities and creations.

Teaching-research-creation clusters

Under the responsibility of two lecturers, these clusters structure the support for la recherche de deuxième cycle and are made up of invited professors, cycle students enrolled in the cluster, and guest members from the academic or professional field. The axes developed by the clusters may overlap, giving rise to joint activities. From a pedagogical point of view, the orientation of the second cycle is structured by the addition of the axes, methods and content of the clusters. Students wishing to enroll in the establishment’s training program are therefore committed to developing their activities within a cluster whose areas of work provide a framework for training and productive exchanges.

The poles are not based on a particular medium, but on a set of concerns and a specific work methodology: they serve as a frame of reference and a resource base for the student’s project. Each center offers an individualized teaching approach, tailored to each student’s project, as well as collective thematic approaches, renewed each year.

The hubs are therefore areas of expertise covering one of the fields of multimedia graphic design offered by the school. They are supported by local partners: accès)s(, le Bel Ordinaire, Artice, the City of Pau’s Department of Art and History, the network of local media libraries, the Image/Imatge art centers in Orthez and the Chapelle Saint-Jacques in Saint-Gaudens.

Student project

As part of the second cycle, students are encouraged to develop their own projects, with the support of the teaching teams in the various departments.

This is an opportunity for students to specialize and put what they’ve learned in the first cycle into perspective. In parallel with the project follow-up, pedagogical projects are offered within the divisions during semesters 7 and 9. These enable students to develop collective projects, in collaboration with institutional or private partners, open to the outside world and aimed at both the general public and specialists in the field. These projects pay particular attention to research, through study days, seminars, residencies and exhibitions, as well as to professionalization, through relations with production and distribution partners and venues.

Diploma and thesis

The DNSEP exam consists of the production of a plastic work and the presentation of a dissertation, developed in relation to the plastic work. It accompanies the work and structures a territory of analysis that complements the plastic and graphic productions. Its form is guided by the teaching team, which defines the requirements to be met by the student in terms of content, form and method. The student is accompanied by a “practical” tutor from each division and a theoretical tutor. They maintain a relationship of mutual responsibility. This support is by no means exclusive. On the contrary, requests from other teachers, assistants and professionals are greatly encouraged. The thesis is a way of articulating form and content, reinventing the tools of writing to best adapt them to a specific content. The DNSEP jury is a college of peers who put the work to the test.

The “Image, Publishing and Character Design” department focuses on the idea of publication, in the sense of making content public and reflecting on the published object. Each student is encouraged to assert his or her own vision, developing notions of point of view, subjectivity and argument, so as to explore the limits of the genre.

Mastery of the image and its issues is a central point, with each student able to design his or her own iconography, or formulate/use a pre-existing archive if the project so requires, in order to put it at the service of a project in which he or she experiments with and questions the place and function of the image.

The aim is not to train specialists in type design, but to enable students to master the issues involved, so that they can develop different types of alphabets (from title design to labour design), if they so wish, as part of a more global publishing project.

Based on formal experimentation and the formulation of a working problem, on the identification of design constraints, the framework for intervention and its consequences, students are led to question the very relevance of the project, its function (for whom, why), the choice and use of different media and means of distribution. Encompassing questions of text/image relationships, the production and/or management of iconography, as well as different media - paper (editions, booklets, posters, etc.) and screen (pdf, websites, etc.) - students are required to structure, order and give meaning to a certain amount of information by making it visible and legible.

Through partnerships set up by teachers, such as the town of Mourenx, the Chapelle Saint-Jacques art center, the Centre d’art image/imatge or the FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, or through personal thematic content developed by students, they are encouraged to develop a way of thinking and writing that they can use to support their own project, as well as that of a client.

Professionalization

The question of professionalization / awareness of the commission is also an integral part of the training program, and through various editorial projects carried out in collaboration with our partners, students are encouraged to participate fully in the editorialization of content, as well as in all aspects of production, including meetings with papermakers, meetings with the printer, management and drafting of quotations, press proofs, etc.

In addition, in the context of seminars, conferences or study days, students are asked to work specifically on the question of interviews, both in terms of writing, time management with speakers and information retrieval procedures (filmed interviews, sound recording, specific organization proposal with projection, etc.) as well as issues linked to their editorialization, retranscription, proofreading and correction.

This work requires a sound historical and theoretical knowledge of the medium, and the department is structured around a range of practical workshops on graphic design and image culture, seminars, study days and workshops, enabling students to develop their critical faculties and approach projects with a methodology close to that of documentary/documentation.

The cluster New Media is dedicated to exploring the challenges of graphic design through the prism of digital practices and cultures. The course aims to enable students to meet the expectations of a design project linked to digital media (motion design, game design, device design, interface or user experience design, storytelling, interactive design, digital mediation). Students build their projects voluntarily and with commitment, with an active ability to make contact, and the pedagogical follow-up is based on support that takes into account the specific features of each project. The pedagogical approach favors “Learning by Doing” and experimentation, but is resolutely structured in a balance between specific cultures and the logic of professionalization.

Digital writing

The digital writing axis tackles questions of publication, mainly online, in the specificity of their relationship to their medium (hypertextuality, interactivity, non-linearity, multimedia or transmedia dimensions…). Possible fields of intervention range from interface design to the conception of user experiences, from documentary journalism to interactive fiction, from data design to animated, graphic, sound and text experiments.

Transmission sessions are based on the presentation of projects from the many fields and disciplines in which these new forms of writing are being invented. These presentations provide an opportunity to explore different approaches and take an analytical look at these productions. Production time is divided between collective projects and individualized follow-up, tailored to the student’s project and providing technical, cultural and critical support.

In parallel with these activities, a digital culture workshop is offered in conjunction with the 1st cycle web workshop. It is open to students in the cluster, but more widely to students in second cycle, art option or undergraduate courses. It tackles issues specific to online productions, enabling students to discover or develop their technical, cultural or political dimensions. It is also a forum for debate and collaboration between students.

Group projects

With le festival accèss, dedicated since 2000 to the dissemination of electronic and digital artistic creation in the field of visual arts, music and live performance, the New Media division has been running an inaugural annual workshop since 2016, inviting students from the division to produce a digital mediation object offered to festival audiences. This collaboration provides an opportunity to experiment with the forms and uses of digital media, both in their technical and operational dimensions and in their cultural and professional dimensions. In addition to this dedicated workshop, undergraduate and double-degree workshops are programmed in line with the themes addressed by the cluster’s students, who are then invited to participate.

Occasional projects are carried out with a view to professionalization, with a group of students supported by teaching staff in the production of real projects Machines utopiques in 2017 - 2018, plateforme Vidæo in 2018 - 2019 or as part of the Entrepreneuriales program (since 2017).

Study days are regularly organized within the cluster. In 2017, Médias ~ médiations focused on exploring digital mediation practices in the museum and cultural field. In 2018, Faites vos jeux explored the proximity of play and creation. In 2020/21, the next day will focus on radical forms of contemporary webdesign.