The Graphic Design BFA program at Cleveland Institute of Art takes an expansive approach to the discipline, seeing it as a means to make meaning, shape culture, and build community.
As a student here, you develop your craft as a designer with a balance between rigor and play. You learn how to find ideas through research and develop concepts through hands-on making with various creative tools, spanning analog and digital modes, and emerging and traditional technologies. With a depth in typography and form-making, you learn how to visually communicate ideas, messages, and experiences across systems of media—in print, on screen, and in space. Ultimately, you learn how to think critically about and beyond your own lived experience, and grow into a creative risk-taker equipped to thrive in a variety of career paths.
Your BFA begins with CIA’s Foundation program. It’s a yearlong introduction to forms, methods, media, and concepts, and the groundwork on which to build as you progress through your major. In your second year, you embark on an exploration into the basic principles and practices of visual communication. Studio courses covering typography, image- and form-making, ideation, and iteration, provide an immediate immersion into the core processes of the discipline.
You deepen your conceptual thinking and expand the ways of realizing ideas in your third year. You build practical making skills through experimentation with various analog and digital creative tools, gain real-world experience through interdisciplinary and client-based collaboration, and learn how to engage with more complexity through the design of visual systems.Your fourth year is devoted to developing an independent body of work while pursuing a path of visual research and inquiry. You explore questions and investigate issues that you care deeply about towards growing creative, purpose-driven ideas. You translate your process and thinking into a designed form for others to experience. As a practice in presentation but also in “making public,” you learn how to critically engage in social and cultural contexts through visual means.
 Throughout your studies, liberal arts courses in art and design history, theory, and the humanities develop essential research, writing, and critical thinking skills that support and feed into your studio practice. In and outside of the classroom at CIA, through close collaboration with your peers and faculty, you  play an integral part in the active creation of a vibrant, energized community of makers and thinkers. We host local, national, and international designers who run workshops, give lectures, and participate in critiques. Much of what you make, how you make, and with whom you make will happen in the real-world — through projects with external partners, presentations and exhibitions, and other opportunities to connect with the local design community.
As a GD student, you’re provided with a dedicated workspace that you can customize to make your own. The workspaces are one-of-a-kind units, built with repurposed timber sourced from demolished houses in the local Cleveland area and designed by our talented studio neighbors in the Industrial Design program. The units are modular, allowing for a variety of different configurations that create a dynamic and collaborative studio environment.
Other distinctive GD facilities include: a newly launched makerspace, featuring a Risograph, binding machines and other print production equipment, a lightbox for documenting work, and an industrial sewing machine; as well as a letterpress print shop that we share with Printmaking, complete with three Vandercook printing presses and all of the hot metal type you’d ever need.
Beyond what’s offered as part of GD, you’ll have access to a wide range of making tools and creative spaces across campus, including an array of professional production equipment in the Digital Output Center, wood and metal fabrication studios, and exciting emerging technologies in the Interactive Media Lab, a brand new facility opening in the spring of 2025.
Current full-time faculty in CIA GD are Adam Lucas, Associate Professor; and Katie Melnick, Professor of Practice. Adjunct faculty include Ben Fogarty, Scott Lucas, Missy Mack, Pam Spremulli, and Jamie Wilhelm. Our Technical Specialist is Jazmin Harkin.
This website was designed by Adam Swift Lucas and built with Cargo, an excellent site-building tool that provides generous support for students and educators. Thanks, Cargo. The content on this site is in (perpetual) progress, as is the GD program at CIA, although both small announcements and major updates should make their way here regularly. This writing is typeset in Axo, designed by Charles Mazé and published by Abyme. Axo is a typeface that is based on standardized lettering models from mid-century Europe — ubiquitous letterforms often found in school manuals, technical drawings, and architectural plans. To learn more about CIA GD, feel free to reach out to Adam at aslucas@cia.edu. If you’re interesed in applying to the program, you can do so here.

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Image information:

Overview (images 01–03)
  1. The first annual pop-up exhibition of our student-run literary arts magazine designed and produced in Publication Design, a GD studio elective, and Editing + Publishing, a Liberal Arts elective
  2. Student work from Typography I by Jade Popovitz ‘26
  3. Student work from Production Studio by Megan Manns ‘26 — a kinetic typography animation promoting a current exhibition at CIA

Facilities (images 04–06)
  1. Emersyn Black ‘25 (left) and Violet Randle ‘25 doing some heads-down work in their studio spaces
  2. Visiting designer Shadi Ayoub (The 961 Collective) teaches Sid Rogers ‘26 how to letterpress print on one of our Vandercooks
  3. Students trimming, printing, and documenting in our studio makerspace

Etc (images 07–09)
  1. Jade Popovitz ‘26 and Sid Rogers ‘26 participate in a hands-on workshop led by visiting designer Jacinda Walker (design exlporr), photo courtesy of Michael Butz
  2. (left to right) Matison Griffie ‘25, Gabby Garnett ‘24 (IL), and Autumn Owens ‘24 (IL) collaborate on creating materials for our student-run literary arts magazine
  3. Stacey Bruce ‘27 installs her work from the Typography I course