Studying Design Marketing (creative and cultural industries) at Kingston University

Hi! I am a first year at Kingston’s School of Art. I study Design Marketing BA (Hons) which is part of the Creative and Cultural Industries department that also offers Art Direction and Events and Experiences.
I originally wanted to pursue a degree apprenticeship after A-levels but found that they are extremely rare in the creative sector, especially in marketing. I am interested in art and creating but realised that a career in this was not suited for me. Finding a combination of this with marketing was perfect. I went into my Design Marketing course intrigued about what I was going to learn.
From the ‘offer holder’ day, I got to meet my future lecturers and could see that they shared a passion for the subject and were extremely educated in the industry which is the reason they created this new course which has only been running for a few years. Third-year students were also there to share their experiences from the course. They said that when looking for employment using this degree, they found that they were more employable as the course provided an all-rounder in expertise and skill so instead of hiring a person with a certain skill, we would be hired as we have knowledge across the board.
I started the course in late September and instantly felt engaged in it and was learning things I had never even thought of before. This first year has provided me with a variety of skills, especially in a variety of Adobe software. I have enjoyed the briefs we have had to follow either individually or in groups. Working in groups has been interesting to see how other people work and create ideas together. Some of our briefs this year have been to create an IMAX advert (storyboard into filming or animation) and a VR gallery exhibition (finding art for the exhibition, creating promotional posters and building the gallery itself on a variety of software). My favourite brief has been to create an activity to reduce social media usage… a ‘digital detox’. My group and I came up with a design for an activity colouring book. We used a variety of unknown London locations, researched these, included all information on the places in our book and then digitally drew a ‘colouring in’ style picture for each location. We printed this book and used the facilities at the university to produce a physical copy, cut by the guillotine and coil bound. We were so impressed with our final design and so were our classmates and tutors, who have encouraged us to start selling our book online! We are already putting into play the skills we have learnt from our course and are making money from it!
Our learning days at Uni have been Tuesdays and Thursdays for my year. These are full days from 10-5 but work perfectly for people commuting in that just travel in for the two whole days instead of random hours here and there. Having full days also helps when having a creative flow that won’t be disrupted by short lesson hours. We finished our first year at the end of March and will start our second year in September. We are encouraged to pursue a project over the summer, and I have decided to pursue to colouring book idea.
I am so excited for second year where we split off from the whole of the creative and cultural industry department and specifically learn about our chosen course, mine being Design Marketing.
Please let me know if you have any questions about my course or the whole of the department. I didn’t know anything about my course from other students before starting as it is such a new course, so I would love to share more of my experience!
Yasmin (BA Design Marketing)

Hi Yasmin, how is second year in Design Marketing?

Hi @reniedeni11
I am really enjoying the Creative and Cultural industries (CCI) course in my second year and couldn't recommend it more!
As I mentioned in my blog before, first year is a generic year that all the CCI students share together. In the first term of second year, we have two modules that we study. One of these modules is the specific CCI course you chose (design marketing, art direction...). In the next term, after Christmas, we then study a new set of two modules that you share with all CCI students and not in your specific course. These 4 modules we studied (3 being for all CCI students) were super enjoyable and we have all come away from second year saying we can visibly see our work improving and how much more confident we feel with our skills. My favourite module has been the live briefs module where we got 5 briefs over 3 months, working with different sized random groups each time, briefed by clients from companies in the industry and pitching to them our ideas.
At the beginning of second year I swapped from Design Marketing to Art Direction as I realised from what I learnt in first year, I was more interested in the campaign side of marketing and generating ideas for different briefs which is what Art Direction offered. My friends in Design Marketing still really enjoyed their module as that's what they were interested in.
As the course is purely coursework and no exams, we finish lessons at the end of March. So I am just finalising a few briefs for deadlines but have finished lessons and uni time for the year!
I hope this helped- and please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!
-Yasmin (Kingston Rep)

Hi Yasmin,
What are the differences between Design Marketing and Art Direction?