Culver City High School CTE · Visual & Performing Arts Grades 9–12 · 10 Credits UC a–g: F + G Aug 19, 2026 → Jun 11, 2027

The
Studio

Graphic Design · Mr. Darien · Tech Center

This isn't a class where you learn software and then maybe use it someday. It's a design studio. You get real clients, real deadlines, and by June a portfolio that lives on the internet with your name on it.

The premise

You're not a student here.
You're on staff.

Eight times this year, a brief lands. Sometimes the client is the yearbook. Sometimes it's theater, who need a poster and need it Tuesday. Sometimes it's a Game Dev team sitting four feet from you in this same room, building something that needs to look like it belongs on a store page. Once, it's you — designing your own identity, because you can't sell a brand to anyone until you've built one.

You get one project a month. That sounds like a lot of time. It isn't, because the work has to actually be good, and because a client is waiting on the other end who will notice if it isn't.

And running underneath all of it, all year, is one more: an open work order. Somebody on this campus needs something designed, and they don't care what month it is. You'll find them, or I'll assign them, and you'll do that job on their schedule instead of mine. That's the one that most resembles the rest of your life.

Every job below gives you a direction to choose and the exact lessons to watch. I teach the concept and demo the tricky part. The rest of my time goes to sitting with people one-on-one, because that's the part you can't get from a video — and the videos, unlike me, can be paused, rewound, and watched at 2× at eleven at night.

The month

How a job runs

Week 1 · Brief

The job drops. We cover the design idea behind it and I demo the one technique you can't get from a video. You research, sketch, and build a mood board. No software yet.

Week 2 · Build

Production. Videos are on you to watch. I'm circulating — grab me. This is the week where asking a question saves you four hours.

Week 3 · Critique

You pin up unfinished work and defend it to the room. Everyone talks. Then you go fix it. Critique is graded — showing up with nothing counts as a zero.

Week 4 · Ship

Deliver to the client, present to the studio, and post it to your portfolio site. Nothing is done until it's on the site.

The docket

Eight jobs,
plus one that never closes

00
Client
Somebody real
Tool
Whatever fits
Dates
Aug 19 – May 7
Ships on the client's date, not mine

The Open Work Order

Real work doesn't arrive on a schedule. Theater needs a poster in October. The front office needs a form that stopped making sense in 2011. ASB remembers a week out. Somewhere on this campus, all year, there is an adult with a design problem and no designer.

You take one. Requests come to the job board in the Tech Center and you claim what you want; if you haven't claimed anything by February, I'll assign you one. You work in pairs, because two people are more likely to survive a client who goes quiet. There are exactly two dates I enforce — a signed work order by Oct 30, and shipped by May 7. Everything between those is between you and them.

Who's hiring
  • Theater — show posters, programs, title cards, lobby boards
  • Film — title sequences, key art, festival submission graphics
  • ASB — dance and rally campaigns, spirit week, election materials, merch
  • Admin & the front office — forms, signage, handbooks, anything printed in 2011 and never touched since
  • Athletics — schedule posters, team graphics, banners
  • Counseling — college and career night, informational one-sheets that people actually read
  • Band, choir, clubs — concert posters, logos, fundraiser materials
  • Game Dev — the room you're already in, if they need something outside of April

That list isn't a menu — it's who has asked before. If somebody on this campus needs something and they're not on it, bring me the request and we'll write the work order.

Pick a direction

A print piece

Poster, flyer, program, banner. Real dimensions, real bleed, a real vendor with real specs you have to hit.

Behance — event posters ↗

A screen piece

Social set, slide template, digital signage. One message that has to survive being resized five ways.

Behance — social campaigns ↗

A system

Signage, wayfinding, a set of templates someone else will use after you leave. Hardest brief, biggest payoff.

Behance — wayfinding systems ↗
Deliverables
  • Signed work order — the studio intake form, filled out sitting with the client, not guessed at. Signed copy to me by Oct 30.
  • Two proposed directions, presented to them
  • The deliverable itself, to the spec they actually need
  • Handoff package — final files, formats, and a short "how to use this"
  • Postmortem — required either way, and the only deliverable if the client vanishes
Watch these
Big idea — The brief is the jobClients say "I need a flyer" and mean six different things. Nobody has ever handed a designer a complete brief. Getting the real requirements out of a person who doesn't know how to give them to you is the actual professional skill, and every other job in this class is training wheels for it.
01
Client
Yourself
Tool
Canva
Dates
Aug 19 – Sep 18
Ships Sep 18

Personal Brand

Before you design for anyone else, design yourself. A mark, a card, and a live website that will hold everything you make this year.

Pick a direction

Monogram

Your initials built from geometry. Hardest to do well, best when it works.

Behance — monogram marks ↗

Wordmark

Your name, typeset with intent. Nothing to hide behind but the type itself.

Behance — wordmarks ↗

Symbol + type

A mark that stands alone, locked to your name. Most flexible, most pieces to get right.

Behance — symbol + type ↗
Deliverables
  • Your mark — three concepts, one final
  • Business card, print-ready
  • Portfolio website, published, real URL — built to the studio spec
  • Two Canva certifications, passed
Watch these
Big idea — ConstraintLimits make better work than freedom does. You'll get two colors and one typeface and be annoyed about it for roughly a week, and then you'll understand.
02
Client
Campus org
Tool
Canva
Dates
Sep 21 – Oct 16
Ships Oct 16

The Event Poster

A real event, a real client, a real date it has to be up by. One message, three completely different shapes.

Pick a direction

Type-dominant

No image at all. The words are the artwork. Loud, cheap to print, nowhere to hide.

Behance — typographic posters ↗

Image-dominant

One photo doing the heavy lifting, type quiet underneath. Lives or dies on the photo.

Behance — photo posters ↗

Modular grid

Swiss-style, information-forward. Best when the event has a lot to say.

Poster House archive ↗
Deliverables
  • 11×17 print poster, with bleed
  • Instagram story, 1080×1920
  • 16:9 for the hallway screens
  • A signed work order, completed with the client before you build anything
Watch these
Big idea — Visual hierarchyWhat the eye hits first, second, third — and the fact that a designer chose that order. Resizing one message into three shapes is how you find out whether you had a hierarchy or just a layout.
03
Client
Self-directed
Tool
Photoshop
Dates
Oct 19 – Nov 20
Ships Nov 20

Panel to Panel

Put images in an order and a stranger will move through them exactly the way you built it — or exactly the way you didn't. Panel size is emphasis. The gutter is pacing. The page turn is a punchline. Manga, comics, and storyboards are the same skill wearing different clothes, so pick the clothes.

You are not being graded on how well you draw. Photo reference, traced composites, purely typographic panels, and Unreal or game-engine screenshots used as underlays are all fair game.

Pick a direction

Manga page

Right-to-left reading order, irregular panel breaks, tone and texture, sound effects drawn as type.

Behance — manga pages ↗

Comics page

Western grid, balloons and tails, lettering that has to sit inside someone else’s speech.

Behance — comic lettering ↗

Storyboard sequence

Shot by shot for something that actually moves, with camera notes and timing. Rough is correct here.

Behance — storyboards ↗
Deliverables
  • Cover or title frame
  • One full spread, or 8–12 sequential panels
  • All lettering set by you — no untouched default type
  • Annotated reading-order map: where the eye goes, in what order, and why
  • Storyboard direction only: board something that exists in this building — a Game Dev level, a film class short, a May sting
Watch these
Big idea — Reading order is designedNobody reads a page; they follow a path someone built for them. Change one panel's size and you change what the whole page is about. Existing characters are allowed here — but the further you push them into something of your own, the better it works as a portfolio piece, and it can't be the only thing you show. Client jobs later this year can't use them at all. We'll cover why in December.
04
Client
Open
Tool
Photoshop
Dates
Nov 30 – Dec 18
Ships Dec 18 · 3 weeks only

The Composite

Build an image that cannot be photographed. A poster for a movie that doesn't exist and now, briefly, looks like it does.

Pick a direction

Scale shift

Something tiny made enormous, or the reverse. The oldest trick in surrealism and still the most reliable.

Behance — scale surrealism ↗

Double exposure

Two images sharing one silhouette. Lives or dies on your masking.

Behance — double exposure ↗

World mashup

Two environments stitched into one that reads as real. Hardest lighting problem of the three.

Behance — composite worlds ↗
Deliverables
  • One seamless composite, minimum six source images
  • Technical spec sheet — dimensions, resolution, color mode, format, and why you chose each
  • Source log — every asset licensed, credited, or shot by you
Watch these
Big idea — Visual metaphor, and the lawSaying one thing by showing a different thing. This is also the unit where we cover font licensing, stock rights, fair use, AI disclosure, and where fan art actually sits — legal, tolerated, or neither, and why "it's transformative" is a defense with a much narrower meaning than the internet thinks. Designers get sued over this. It's not optional and it's more interesting than it sounds.
05
Client
Yearbook
Tool
Photoshop
Dates
Jan 4 – Jan 29
Ships Jan 29 · semester portfolio due

Yearbook Handoff

The yearbook has a grid, a set of photo specs, and a deadline that does not move. You get one spread inside all of that. Design to somebody else's constraints, hit their standard, and the good ones actually run in the book.

Pick a direction

Editorial

Magazine logic. Big photos, generous space, quiet type. Looks expensive.

Behance — editorial spreads ↗

Archival

Documentary. Contact sheets, captions, dates, index logic. A record, not a scrapbook.

Behance — photo book layouts ↗

Graphic / zine

High contrast, flat color, type as a blunt instrument. Riskiest, most memorable when it lands.

Behance — zine spreads ↗
Deliverables
  • Theme and mood board — direction, palette, type pairing
  • One full spread, built to the yearbook’s actual grid and specs
  • Six photos edited to the book’s standard, consistently graded
  • Caption and headline system others could follow
  • Jobs 01–05 all live on your site by Jan 29
Watch these
Big idea — Systems beat one-offsAnyone can make one good page. Designing a system that holds up across 200 pages made by other people, most of whom are not designers, is the actual job.
06
Client
Campus or real
Tool
Illustrator
Dates
Feb 2 – Mar 19
Ships Mar 19 · before break

The Identity System

A club, a local business, or the studio you'll start someday needs an identity. Not a logo — an identity. The mark, the supporting icons, the rules, and the document that keeps all of it from falling apart in somebody else's hands. Seven weeks, because a real one takes seven weeks.

Pick a direction

Geometric mark

Built from circles, squares, and angles on a construction grid. Scales anywhere.

Behance — geometric marks ↗

Lettermark

The initials themselves, drawn as a shape. Type and mark become one object.

Behance — lettermarks ↗

Emblem / badge

Type locked inside a container. Traditional, trustworthy, a nightmare at favicon size.

Behance — badges & emblems ↗
Deliverables
  • Signed work order, completed with the client
  • Primary mark, one secondary, one at favicon scale
  • 8–12 supporting icons on a shared grid — same stroke weight, same corner radius, same logic. Siblings, not cousins.
  • Brand sheet — palette in hex and CMYK, type system, clear space, misuse examples
  • Icon style guide — stroke weight, corner radius, padding, sizing
  • Exported as SVG and PNG at three sizes
  • 200-word rationale on what the mark means
Watch these
Big idea — Reduction, and symbols you didn't chooseHow much can you take away before the meaning breaks? Find that edge, then step back one. And know that your mark will be read by people who don't know you, in places you've never been, carrying history you never put into it. Design for that.
07
Client
Game Dev 1 & 2
Tool
Illustrator
Dates
Apr 6 – Apr 30
Ships Apr 30 · the big one

The Game Studio Contract

A Game Dev team hires you — and they're sitting in this room, at the next table. They're deep in a build with their own deadline, and they need a visual identity that holds up: a title, an interface, key art, a store page that makes someone stop scrolling. You have four weeks, a client you cannot avoid at lunch, and work that ships inside something people actually play.

Pick a direction

Flat vector

Clean shapes, no gradients, bold color. Fastest to produce, easiest to keep consistent.

Behance — flat game UI ↗

Pixel / retro

Built on a hard grid. Nostalgic, extremely readable, brutal about alignment.

Behance — pixel game art ↗

Hand-drawn vector

Sketched, then traced. Warmest look, hardest to keep consistent across a set.

Behance — hand-drawn game art ↗
Deliverables
  • Signed work order, completed with your Game Dev client
  • Game logo / title treatment
  • UI kit — buttons, health bar, menu frame, HUD
  • 3–5 character or prop vectors, game-ready
  • Key art and a store page mockup
  • Handoff package — organized, named, spec'd, with an asset manifest
Watch these
Big idea — Working to someone else's visionThe hardest professional skill there is. Your taste is not the point. Their game is the point. Every designer has to learn this and most learn it late.
08
Client
You
Tool
Your call
Dates
May 4 – May 29
Proposal due May 8 · ships May 29

Pitch Your Own

Every other job this year, somebody handed you the brief. This time you write it. Audience, deliverable, format, deadline, and why it should exist — on paper, presented to me, approved or sent back before you open a single file.

The proposal is the graded gate. A brief that says "a poster, kind of, for the school" gets rejected and you rewrite it. This is also the month After Effects gets taught, so if you want the thing you pitch to move, the door is open.

Pick a direction

One piece, done properly

A single artifact taken further than anything else this year. Narrow scope, no excuses about time.

Behance — single-piece work ↗

A set

A series that has to hold together — a campaign, a zine, a card deck, a poster run. Consistency is the assignment.

Behance — poster series ↗

Something that moves

Motion, animation, an interactive piece. After Effects is taught this month specifically so this option is real.

Behance — logo animation ↗
Deliverables
  • Written proposal, approved by May 8 — audience, deliverable, exact format and dimensions, deadline, rationale
  • The thing itself, built to the spec you wrote
  • Process documentation — including the parts where your own brief turned out to be wrong
  • Presentation-ready by May 29 for the June showcase
Watch these
Big idea — Nobody hands you the briefAfter school, the hardest part is almost never the making. It's deciding what deserves to be made, defending that decision to somebody, and then being stuck with it. You have spent a year pulling requirements out of other people. Now pull them out of yourself.
09
Client
The public
Tool
Everything
Dates
Jun 1 – Jun 11
Showcase

Ship It

Your site goes public. You stand up and present your best work to people who aren't in this class and aren't obligated to be nice about it.

Pick a direction

Grid

Everything visible at once. Best when the work is strong and speaks for itself.

Behance — grid portfolios ↗

Case study

Long-form, one project per page, process shown. What actually gets you hired.

Behance — case studies ↗

Single scroll

One continuous narrative top to bottom. You control the order people see things in.

Behance — scrolling sites ↗
Deliverables
  • Portfolio site, final — the year’s work, every job with process documentation
  • 300-word artist statement
  • Ten-minute presentation to an outside audience
  • Studio retrospective — what we'd do differently
Watch these
Big idea — This is a careerFreelance, in-house, agency. What a junior portfolio actually needs and what gets it thrown out.
The deliverable that outlives this class

The portfolio

Nothing in this class is finished until it's on your site. Not turned in — published, at a URL you can text to someone. That site is the only thing from this year that still works after you graduate, and it's the thing that gets you a job, an internship, or into a program.

Build
here

Canva Websites — required

Free, publishes to a real address ending in my.canva.site, and you're already learning the tool in Job 01. No code, works on a Chromebook, and it's live in week four instead of week fourteen. Two things to know before you publish: your subdomain cannot be changed after the first publish, so choose your name like it's permanent — because it is. And on a school Education account, I have to approve a site before it can go live, so don't publish at 11:58pm on the 18th.

Post
here too

Behance — strongly encouraged

Free, run by Adobe, and it's where the industry actually looks — including every "see it done" link on this page. Your site is yours; Behance is where strangers find you. Posting a project there takes fifteen minutes once the work exists. Do it after each job ships.

Or
this

Something else — ask first

If you already build websites, use whatever you want. Same requirements apply, and I need the URL by the same date. Don't spend three weeks learning a framework instead of designing — this is a design class, and a beautiful site with three projects on it loses to a plain site with ten.

What every project page has to contain

A gallery of pretty pictures is not a portfolio. Anyone can post images. What separates a portfolio that gets you hired is evidence that you can think, and that lives in five parts:

One

The brief

Who the client was, what they needed, and what the actual constraints were. Two or three sentences. If it was a self-directed job, say what problem you set yourself.

Two

The problem

What made this hard. Every job has one real difficulty. Name it. "The client wanted six messages on one poster" is a better opening line than anything else you could write.

Three

Process — at least three images

Sketches, rejected directions, the version that didn't work. This is the part everyone skips and the part professionals look at first. A killed direction with a sentence explaining why is worth more than another view of the final.

Four

The final, shown in context

Not just the flat file. On a wall, on a phone, in someone's hands, on a store page. A mockup takes ten minutes and changes how the work reads entirely.

Five

What you'd change

One honest sentence. This scares people and it shouldn't — being able to critique your own work is the single clearest signal that you're not a beginner.

Everywhere

Your name and how to reach you

On every page. An about section with a real sentence about you, and an email you actually check. A portfolio with no contact information is a very pretty dead end.

See it done

Case-study portfolios

The format above, done properly. Read three of these before you build yours — the structure will make more sense in ten minutes than it does in this paragraph.

Behance ↗

Student portfolios

Your actual peer group, including work at your level. Useful for calibration: some of it's better than you expect and some of it isn't.

Behance ↗

Mockups in context

How to photograph or mock up flat work so it reads as a real object. The difference between a B and an A on half these jobs.

Behance ↗
Three checkpoints

Sep 18 — site is live with Job 01 on it. Real URL, submitted to me. This is a hard gate; everything after depends on it.

Jan 29 — Jobs 01–05 up, each with all five parts above. Half your grade for the portfolio bucket.

Jun 11 — everything up, artist statement written, presented to an outside audience. Then it's yours, and it keeps working whether or not you ever take another design class.

Two rules that sound obvious and get broken every year. Check it on a phone — most people who see your portfolio will see it on one, and Canva's mobile resize is a toggle, not a guarantee. And no dead links, ever — a broken portfolio link is worse than no link, because it says you didn't check.

Assessment

How you're graded

60

The jobs

Nine of them — eight scheduled plus the open work order. Rubric-scored, and you help write the rubrics, which is a real industry standard and means you know the criteria before you hand anything in. Each job is graded on the finished piece and on the evidence of how it got there: iterations, directions you killed, and why. A designer's process is part of the deliverable, not extra credit.

20

CRED

Career Readiness, Engagement & Discipline — the same rubric as every CTE course I teach. 40 points a month, a self-assessment on Canvas at each month's end, and a substantial daily post in #dsn-standup. Read the full rubric here — it needs a signature before this part of your grade can be entered.

10

Critique

Showing work and talking about other people's. Silence is not neutral here — it's a zero.

10

Portfolio

Checked at semester and at the end. A project isn't finished until it's on your site with the process shown.

Studio policy

House rules

Deadlines

Clients don't accept late work

Neither do I, mostly. Talk to me before a due date and we'll work it out. Talk to me after and we're negotiating from a worse position — which is also a real lesson about this industry.

Attribution

Credit everything

Every font, photo, texture, and asset gets logged with its license. Using something you don't have rights to isn't a style choice, it's the thing that ends careers.

AI

Disclose it, don't hide it

Generative tools are part of this industry now. Use them for ideation, reference, and iteration — and say so in your process documentation. Undisclosed AI in a final deliverable is the same offense as an unlicensed font. Some briefs will restrict it entirely, and those will say so.

Critique

Attack the work, never the person

"I don't like it" is not feedback. "The eye goes to the wrong thing first, here's why" is. You'll get better at receiving this than at giving it, and both take practice.

Software

You don't need to buy anything

Canva is free through school. Adobe is on the Tech Center machines. If access at home is a problem, tell me early and privately — it's solvable and you're not the first person to ask.

Standup

Post in #dsn-standup every day

Three parts: what you shipped, what you're stuck on, what you need. Not "worked on my project." Every studio you'll ever work in runs some version of this, and by June you'll have a written record of your own process for an entire year. It's scored inside CRED.

Clients

You represent this room

On the open work order you're emailing adults who have their own jobs. Reply within a school day, show up to what you scheduled, and tell them early when something slips. One student burning a client costs the next four years of students that client.

Stuck

Twenty minutes, then ask

Struggling with a problem builds skill. Struggling for two class periods builds resentment. Search it, check the assigned lesson, then come find me.

Resources

The toolkit

Every link on this page is free. The lessons inside each job are the assigned ones — this is the master list, including things nobody is making you watch. The people who get ahead of the schedule are obvious by October.

Canva Design School

Jobs 01–02 · Aug–Oct

Photoshop

Jobs 03–05 · Oct–Jan
  • Photoshop for Beginners — full courseEnvato Tuts+ · 23 lessons · ~3 hrs
  • Lessons 1–8 during Job 03Interface, layers, adjustments, color
  • Lessons 18–23 during Job 03Type, layer styles, effects — your lettering block
  • Lessons 9–17 during Job 04Masking, selections, blending, retouching
  • Revisit 1–8 during Job 05Photo grading to the yearbook’s standard

Illustrator

Jobs 06–07 · Feb–Apr

After Effects

Job 08 · May

Design thinking

All year · optional but recommended

Studio forms

Print these · every client job

Where to look

All year · before you open any software

Going further

If this becomes your thing