100% online MDes Design with Graphic Design

Imagine a new future with an MDes Design with Graphic Design from a global university

Apply By 31 December 2024

To Start 7 January 2025

180 credits •
Complete within 24 months •
£6,780 total fees •
5 star QS Teaching Rating (2023)

Why Sunderland?

100% online MDes within 24 months
5 star rating for teaching, inclusiveness, employability and facilities*
Top 40 UK University**
70% of university research rated as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’***
12th in UK for Art and Design****
£6,780 total fees, option to pay £565 per module

*QS Stars World University Rankings 2023
**Guardian University Guide 2025
***Research Excellence Framework 2021
****The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025

Watch your new career in design take shape

Graphic designers combine colour, shape, form to convey meaning and create designs that motivate, inspire and engage. Use your imagination and creativity to help employers develop and deliver their brands to a wide range of audiences with the University of Sunderland’s 100% online MDes Design with Graphic Design.

This course is meticulously crafted to cultivate highly skilled and ethically conscious designers who grasp the influential role of design in shaping society and the world.

Course content delves deeply into critical aspects of graphic design, intertwining theoretical frameworks, historical contexts, practical exercises, and case studies, to help students develop advanced skills needed to critically analyse and innovatively address design challenges.

Emphasising the fusion of design theory and practice, your studies are supported by specialised online tutors committed to your success.

With a focus on flexibility and global relevance, the course spans a diverse range of media, materials, techniques, and processes, so you can tailor your educational journey to your passions and career aspirations. Overall, you will gain the technical proficiency and creative ingenuity, career-focused mindset, and insight into the evolving creative industries landscape needed to thrive in the dynamic realm of graphic design.

Learn by design. A fully flexible learning experience, tailored to your life

Getting the skills and qualifications needed to excel or take your career down a new path, while maintaining your existing work, family and social commitments can be a challenge. This course is designed to help working professionals overcome these barriers with fully online teaching and learning and no need to attend campus.

Structure your studies around your life with asynchronous learning and study at your pace, either full-time or part-time, as and when you’re able.

Our purpose-built digital learning environment is designed to optimise the flexibility made possible by online delivery, so you can pick up your studies as and when you’re able around your day-to-day life.

Six intakes per year also mean you can get started within weeks of admission, even if outside of the traditional academic calendar.

What will you study?

This course aims to graduate skilled and ethical graphic design professionals with a full understanding of how their work can positively impact society and the world. You will develop a systemic understanding of design knowledge and awareness of the existing challenges and new insights of contemporary design practice.

You will develop a keen understanding of the creative industries, so that you know how to recognise career paths, and position and promote your creative projects, understanding likely demand for your work among prospective clients.

Key knowledge and skills taught on this course:

How to generate creative ideas and apply them to design concepts
Develop creative brand awareness concepts using research
Ethical design issues including sustainability, inclusive design and social responsibility
A body of work showcasing original ideas, skills and knowledge application
Producing creative and technically advanced materials to generate paid work
Strategic design thinking and design leadership and management
Transform complex data into engaging, informative graphics
Key principles behind witty graphics applied to a creative brief

A university with global connections and excellent online learning expertise

We are a global university with experience teaching international learners spanning more than 40 years and campus locations in Hong Kong, Sunderland and London, as well as partnerships in the Caribbean, Greece, Kenya, Malaysia, Lanka, Oman, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tashkent and Vietnam. Our students benefit from the wide variety of perspectives, experiences and networks this global focus brings.

Our distance learning students can be found across the world and international students comprise a high percentage of our total student cohort. We are also highly regarded for our efforts in UK widening participation, and have been awarded 7th in the UK for social inclusion (The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024).

Our expertise, our cutting-edge technology and our vast experience delivering excellent online learning experiences to global students is key to what sets the University of Sunderland and our online MDes Design with Graphic Design apart.

Admission requirements

Applicants must be of age 19 and above and should have or be about to complete:

And have

At least a UK 2.2 honours undergraduate degree in a design or related subject (or international equivalent). If you have a third-class honours or ordinary degree in a design-related subject, you will need to submit a digital portfolio of your design practice. This may include previous project work and must include current work-in-progress. It can take the form of a link to your blog or website and/or be presented as an interactive PDF. This will help the academic team assess your suitability for the programme.

Applicants with an undergraduate degree outside of a design-related discipline are also eligible if they can demonstrate relevant design skills. You will need to submit a digital portfolio of your design practice. This may include previous project work and must include current work-in-progress. It can take the form of a link to your blog or website and/or be presented as an interactive PDF. This will help the academic team assess your suitability for the programme.

Applicants who do not hold a recognised degree will be asked to provide evidence which demonstrates a minimum of 3 years’ relevant work experience alongside their portfolio.

Software requirements for studying this course

Students will need their own access to some software licenses. (The University could provide guidance with the students pricing)

Adobe Creative Cloud
Microsoft 365
Clo3d (MDes Design with Fashion Design)
ToonBoom Essentials, Advanced or Premium (MDes Design with Animation Design)
Maya (MDes Design with Animation Design)
3D Studio Max (MDes Design with Animation Design)
Maxon One Student (Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Red Giant, Red Shift, Capsules, Training, etc) (MDes Design with Graphic Design)

Fees

Total course fees: £6,780
Per 15-credit module fee: £565

If you are based in the UK, you may be eligible for a government-backed postgraduate loan to cover the full costs of the course.

In addition, if you have successfully completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Sunderland, you are eligible for a 10% tuition fees reduction on our postgraduate programmes.

You pay tuition fees for each module taken, either module-by-module or in full at the start of your course.

If you pay module-by-module, you will pay in instalments of £565.

Modules

What’s the Big Idea?

Gain a critical understanding and experiment with a range of ideation techniques and approaches to developing creative ideas. Finetune your understanding with input from top professionals and understand how to honestly rate an idea. Learn to build a hook to captivate your audience, whether through storytelling and narrative, surprise and novelty, authenticity and passion or clever copywriting.

Effectively present and communicate your ideas. Select and apply your ideation techniques to produce imaginative concepts for a live or envisaged project.

Design for the Planet

Develop a critical understanding human activity’s impact on this planet, and the intentions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Learn how to be more sustainable in your own design practice, and how to use the power of design to influence other people to live more sustainably. Explore sustainability through a variety of lenses such as climate action, reversing poverty, good health and wellbeing for all, gender equality, affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, life below water and more.

Apply your design skills to address one of the many important global challenges in SDG. Aim to win a University Sustainable Futures Prize through your work in trying to make the world fit for future generations.

Masters Approaches to Research and Methodologies

Boosting the Brand: Getting noticed in a micro-attention world

Learn how to make a brand stand out in an increasingly a micro-attentive world. Capture attention across different media and platforms including social media. Understand and experiment with key design approaches such as micro-content and snackable design, interactive and immersive experiences, multi-sensory branding, brand storytelling and associations and more. Develop a deeper understanding of brand personality, tone of voice and maintaining authenticity.

Apply your design knowledge and skills to an exciting branding project and document your creative journey through a module journal/design diary.

Design Futures: New and Emerging Technologies in the Creative Process

Experiment with a range of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and new technologies designed to generate text, images, video, sound, computer code and other key outputs. Gain a critical understanding of the copyright and ethical considerations in the use of AI. Develop a robust understanding of how AI tools and new technologies can be used ethically in the process of creative design, without replacing the need for human expertise, decision-making and ingenuity. Apply your developing skills with AI to creative outcomes.

Design Activism

Gain the critical knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to lead and manage design-driven initiatives in various industries, fostering innovation, and driving business success through design. Gain insights into strategic design thinking and the leadership and management of design.

Develop an understanding of practical applications by learning from real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful design management practices. Understand some of the key considerations and issues around intellectual property and copyright.

Recognise some of the issues around managing teams and external partners, and better understand the role of a designer in the bigger picture of the design process. Use your creative design skills to explain or illuminate important aspects of design management to a non-specialist audience.

Design Management: Effective Control of the Creative Process

Design for Social Impact

Develop a critical understanding of the role and power of design to change hearts and minds, perceptions and behaviours, and create real impact on society. Develop your study skills and research methodology. Investigate and critically evaluate how key approaches to design for social change have succeeded or failed in your own specialism, in past and contemporary work.

Identify important societal or global issues that you are passionate about, and apply what you’ve learned to develop your own ideas, concepts and creative designs for a project that will help make the world a better place.

Employment, Entrepreneurship and Professional Practice

Gain a critical understanding of strategies to maximise the chances of interview and employment including common shortlisting processes, and key interview questions and responses. Critically evaluate approaches to self-employment and the pros and cons of different types of structure. Understand some of the key profit/loss, tax implications and impacts on lifestyle, of being employed or self-employed.

Develop strategies for identifying employers or clients that would value your style of work and those you would like to work with. Fine-tune how you describe your skills and knowledge and align it to your ideal career path.

The Portfolio/Showreel and Design for Self-Promotion

Gain a critical understanding of what constitutes good self-promotional materials in differing contexts, such as showreel, portfolio and online profile. Understand the power of interaction with your audience and plan to harness unpaid promotion and advertising. Learn the language of self-description, that allows the highlighting of strengths while avoiding appearance of arrogance.

Apply your advanced skills to design self-promotional materials that will give you the best chance of gaining the kind of work that you aspire to do as a career.

InfoGraphics and Data-driven design

Critically understand data types, structures and sources. Apply techniques of data visualisation and visual storytelling to transform complex data into engaging, informative graphics. Develop your skills with key online tools and software for creating infographics, and understand ethical considerations such as avoiding bias or misrepresentation. Understand how the approach to infographics can change between static, interactive and motion infographics.

Humour and Wit in Graphic Design

Gain a critical understanding of how humour and wit have been used successfully in graphic design in past and contemporary work. Deconstruct and develop a critical awareness of some of the key principles behind witty graphics. Recognise how humour can change drastically through different cultures and parts of the world. Understand some of the most important elements, principles and techniques for deploying humour in design work.

Apply your learning creatively to a design brief.