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.