What Happens When Graphic Design Majors Learn To Code

I’m going into my third year teaching Advanced Web Design at SNHU. It’s incredible how time flies. I had my 4 year old say on the drive home, “Hey dad?…when I grow up, I’m going to your school.” (Yeah, that blew my mind.)

I really care about each student that takes my class and once again, I was very proud of many of them. There were several first occasions happen this time around. For the first time I saw custom dropdown CSS menus with subtle hover animations built. We always aim to create a responsive website but due to time, we don’t get that accomplished. But this time around, I had a couple students take it to the next level and they shared a mobile-friendly website for their final website presentation.
 

As graphic design majors, many do run into the “I can’t do this professor” barrier and unfortunately those students repeat the course. Those that really try and break through the barrier find the “I can’t believe I did this!” moment. These are moments that I value the most and is why I continue teaching.
 

This semester’s non-profit client was CTAC. CTAC helps individuals and families own, learn and use computers. The course is designed to go through a four phase process; Discovery, Creative, Development & Debugging. The students learn the purpose of a website design by experiencing a real world scenario.

Here are the top three WordPress websites custom designed and built from the ground up chosen by CTAC. Once again, I’m very proud of all of my students. We’ve added a user experience course for this fall (2016). I’m very excited to teach this course and I’m really looking forward to helping students look at websites from a different perspective.

Kyle Phillips
Website Design & Development

 
Paige Lynch
Website Design & Development

 
Ryan Barnaby
Website Design & Development