Art Department - Fall 2026 - Digital Art - Ronaldo Kiel
ARTD 2811 Introduction to Digital Art - Desktop Publishing (Formerly ART 48.11)
Section: WQ6 - Code 42029 - W 06:05-09:45PM 01 OL - Sep 02 to Dec 16, 2026
Course Description Class Projects Schedule Important Dates Contact Index
The five course projects are described below. They will require at least four hours of out-of-class work per week in your computer. The tutorials and educational materials provided by the software packages themselves will help you and should be followed as supplementary aids during the course. The software tutorials are a good reference for the basic knowledge that we will be building during class-time.
All Projects should be uploaded to the Black Board web site as PDFs.
The Projects are:
Project #1: Business Identity System
Letterhead (8.5" x 11")
Envelopes (9 1/2" x 4 2/16")
Business Card (2"x 3 1/2")
This design project includes the creation of the logotype for a business or an individual and its applications in business cards, envelopes, letterheads, etc.
Steps complete this Project:
1. Determine if you’re designing for a business or an individual. For instance, the Brooklyn College Art Department uses official letterhead paper for its college mail, while department professors can request personal business cards.
Analyze your project’s requirements and select the appropriate visual elements, such as typefaces, colors, and/or images. Consider if there’s a visual element that can serve as a “hook” to help identify your client.
2. Design a logotype and define the visual elements that will be used throughout the business system. Colors and typographic elements for the business system are usually consistent across all pieces. Logo designs are typically developed in vector-oriented software packages like Illustrator, which produce resolution-independent graphics.
3. Design the three basic pieces of your Business Identity System: business cards, letterhead, and envelopes.
4. Print your business system using the appropriate paper sizes. Trim the business card to its correct size or use crop marks to define the paper sizes. It’s not necessary to use actual envelopes to print your final envelope designs. If you’re taking this class online and using Illustrator, please upload your design as a single PDF file containing all three art boards.
Project #2: Poster
Poster (minimum size: 11" x 17"). Illustrator files combining bitmapped images, vector files and typefaces.
The goal of this project is to take you through the creation and production of a poster for a specific event. The event can be a music show or festival, some kind of competition or any other subject matter suitable to be advertised in a poster format; the subject is up to you.
You might want to look at some of the sites listed below for poster design ideas:
Vintage Posters - International Poster Gallery http://www.internationalposter.com/
PosterConnection Online - History of the Poster http://posterconnection.com
Posters are usually designed to catch the viewer's attention at a certain distance, therefore they are usually printed in large formats. The computer lab's laser printer can print tabloid (11" x 17"). In this project you are not required to print anything bigger than 11" x 17".
Project #3: Brochure
Threefold Brochure (8.5" x 11") printed on both sides from an InDesign file.
This brochure should fold properly into a self-mailer.
The threefold self-mailer format is very popular in advertising because of its low printing cost and its simple distribution by mail.
In this project you will design a brochure for a hypothetical client. For example, you can use the same client you choose for project #1 and create an advertisement for the business, or you can come up with something new. The important part of this project is to set your design precisely, to be able to print and fold your brochure in one piece of paper.
Project #4: Newsletter
Four-page newsletter from an InDesign file containing the following page elements: masthead, headers and footers (page#), body copy, headlines, and images.
This project emphasizes techniques used to design magazines, newspapers and any other multiple page publication. You will learn to design page elements so that they will appear automatically on all of the pages of your publication. You will also learn how link text boxes and have the text flowing from box to box or from page to page automatically. You will design a masthead for the front page of your publication and create style sheets that can be applied to your titles, subtitles and body copy. Images complementing articles can be scanned and placed in your pages.
Project #5: Collage
Digital Image Collage (manipulation of scanned images in PhotoShop.)
For print work, Adobe PhotoShop enables professional photo retouching and color correction. PhotoShop also offers a variety of ways to create and manipulate digital images. It can be used to create sophisticated illustrations from scratch or to radically transform your images with the use of filters, color adjustments, layering and masking to achieve the effects that you want.
PhotoShop is a very flexible tool. You will explore its features to composite several images into a digital image collage. You final work should be printed on the computer lab's color printers on photo quality paper. The Inkjet color printer will not work well with normal paper for this project.