The Graphic Design for Marketing (GDMA) program is a four-year, selective entry degree program. Reflecting the expanding boundaries of the graphic design profession, and the industry’s need for graduates with a wide range of complementary and interdisciplinary skills, GDMA focuses on the definite connection between Graphic Design and Marketing. This marriage provides the foundation for the program, which seeks also to address the demand for graphic designers sensitive to public relations and business, with an understanding of the interactions between design and society.

In the contemporary market place, graphic designers function not only as problem solvers and analysts, planners and strategists, expert communicators and skilled technologists, but also as team players and entrepreneurs. The ability to apply design theory and processes with critical thinking and creative problem solving will set GDMA graduates apart, and make them responsive to a complex and changing industry. This program underscores the importance of the social impact of design, and caters to the reality that designers must be aware of the world to effectively design for it.

The graduating class of 2007 is the inaugural group for Kwantlen’s new GDMA program. This graduation show, a slight deviation from traditional design exhibitions, is a series of projects built on research, aspiring to address design for a contemporary marketplace. Appropriately weighted with critical considerations of marketing and business, these projects focus on real world feasibility. They represent an effort to produce meaningful work that will come to serve purpose to the ever-expanding definition of community.

In the ongoing process of learning and exploration, we challenged ourselves to truly consider the value design can have for the user. When supported with market research, and the desire to create work that is functional, Graphic Design achieves definitive purpose and limitless possibility. This exhibition is the result of planning, exploration, and curiosity. It is Graphic Design considered from a variety of perspectives.