Sep 20, 2012

Vancouver, BC – Langara College is launching two new programs in its Continuing Studies Department this fall with a strategic eye placed on the advertising industry. The Commercial Illustration Certificate Program and the Advertising Copywriting Certificate Program are poised to become the College's next foray into the applied arts.

The first - the two-year Commercial Illustration Program - is harnessing the talent of the Lower Mainland's top illustrators and educators to train students to enter the business-minded, communications conscious world of commercial illustration. Students will be trained in traditional methods of drawing and painting, but also in digital and electronic formats. Their learning will be rounded out with business issues like pricing, contracts, and self-promotion, as well as editorial, storyboarding, and advertising concepts.

Artists like Pascal Milelli - whose clients have included Harper's Magazine and the Vancouver Opera, and whose work has graced the cover of Communication Arts Magazine - will be leading students to realize their own creative ambitions through the illustrator's process.

"The essence of an illustrator's process is communication: conveying a message and meaning in visual form," said the instructor, who is teaching Drawing for Illustration this fall. "Part of the dance is finding the footing between reflecting the text, question, or message, without being obvious or simply decorative. Students can expect to get a working experience of an illustrator's process from our program, from the initial gathering of ideas to the execution of the actual artwork."

"Commercial communications is encroaching into the fine art world," added Greg Blue, Langara's Manager of Creative and Applied Arts in Continuing Studies. "The reality is that pop art and communications is becoming much more of a social, artistic medium than just simply drawing a picture of a vacuum cleaner to sell vacuum cleaners. Our program doesn't only give people an opportunity to stretch their artistic muscles - they'll be doing it in an incredibly strategic and industry-minded way."

Joining the Commercial Illustration Program will be the one-year Advertising Copywriting Certificate Program, designed to hone the skills of would-be "mad men" in the Lower Mainland. The nine-course program will train students in the craft of writing for print, radio, television, and web, as well as how to develop marketable and relevant concepts.

"In a typical ad agency there is a creative team that works on a project - an art director and a copywriter," said Blue. "We already train art directors through our Communication Arts Program, so we created the Copywriting Program to fill in the other side of that creative team."

Copywriting students will be working alongside those in Communication Arts in the hopes that many creative partnerships will blossom from the complimentary programs.

"The research that we've done with ad agencies is that true copywriting programs are few and far between in Canada,". "We want a program that trains copywriters from a highly strategic and specific perspective. The students in this program will not just be working on the words - they'll be working on the concept as well."

Both Copywriting and Commercial Illustration start this week through Langara Continuing Studies.

Learn more.
Annie Mullins
Communications Officer
Communications & Marketing
Langara College
604.323.5058 | amullins@langara.bc.ca