Communication Design’s 1st cycle course is compliant with current European guidelines for Higher Education and breaks new ground in Design, both scientifically and pedagogically. The course will train upcoming professionals and researchers in Communication Design and encompasses two paired training elements: a hands-on element with direct links to cultural and market realities, preparing the students for a fit professional performance; a conceptual and research element, allowing any upcoming designer to strike out his own development and creative space.

Design is currently expanding as never before, both nationally as well as internationally. It has never been so pliant, targeting so many contexts of communication and expression. Design’s mark is nowadays stamped in the hard sciences as well as the corporate world, in advertising and movies, stretching out to individual needs and a new generation boasting an unprecedented high degree of visual literacy. The course has this in mind and provides ample training, supplying the student with resources in Design's variegated dimensions:

• Multimedia and New Digital Cultures.
• Editorial Design, Typography and Illustration
• Corporate and Institutional Identity.
• Image and Narrative Practice Studies.
• Design History and Analysis.
• Visual Culture Studies.

All of these areas are included in the course, in playgrounds of inquiry and lab practice, devoted to personalized learning contexts and team work models.

The course’s structure encapsulates common ground training and branches out into optional subjects and projects within three areas: Graphic Design, Multimedia Design and Visual Culture.

The Communication Design course will keep a privileged relation with Fine Arts courses in University of Porto — Faculty of Fine Arts. This relationship grants the chance of an ever expanding training horizon and a fertile creative context. In tandem with this goal, the course will develop internships, exhibits and projects in partnership with groups and institutions other than the Faculty. The Socrates-Erasmus student exchange program will keep an open door policy with some of the best European Design institutions, feeding off teacher and student exchange as well as partnership projects. These collaborations are international and range from The Netherlands, Turkey, Finland, UK and Switzerland to the Czech Republic. These are only a few of the most successful from the circa 30 European protocols.

Crowning our achievements, we will mention briefly the awards some of our Communication Design students have won in national and international competitions (Cinanima; Porto Digital; Cannes Advertising Festival; Lisbon Oceanarium; New Creators Award; Corta Festival; Inroads into Portuguese Cinema, et al.).