CERTIFICATE REQUIREMENTS

Required New Media Design Core Courses (4 credits each).

Choose two from the following:

DMS 537 - New Media I
DMS 538 - New Media II
ART 550 - Design for New Media I

New Media Design Electives (4 credits each).

Choose two from the following (required course selections cannot be duplicated as electives, or vice versa):

ART 550 - Design for New Media I
ART 551 - Design for New Media II
DMS 528 - Social Web Media
DMS 537 - New Media I
DMS 538 - New Media II
DMS 546 - Interface Design

Total Certificate Requirements - 16 credits

New Media Design Course Descriptions

DMS 537 New Media I
Intro to New Media I will give you a firm basis in the fundamentals of website design and authoring. We will survey the structure of the Web and interrelated technologies such as HTML browsers, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), FTP, search engines, and more. We will begin writing HTML by hand and work our way up to combining all of our skills and tools to create interactive streaming vector animations. To create websites we will use the three most common tools for professional web design: Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, and Macromedia Flash. In addition to learning the technical craft of designing websites, we will survey different design histories, concepts, and trends, paying special attention to what kinds of rhetorical structures work best in particular situations. Students should finish this course with a good ability to create very nice websites and the fundamentals required to either engage with the online developer communities to further advance their skills, pursue advanced coursework in web development, or both. Lab fee $100.

DMS 538 New Media II
Intro to New Media II is geared towards introducing you to important concepts in working with multimedia. The best New Media works take advantage of their multimedia and dynamic capabilities. In this course we will focus on using audio, animation, and video in online and disc-based New Media projects. Among the technologies we will explore will be Flash-based projects, embedded and streaming online multimedia, cd-rom and dvd authoring. This course is intended to be a survey of basic skills that will provide a foundation upon which you can build in the future by taking more advanced and skill-specific courses. Course work will consist of three small exercises and a final project. Each student will create a course-specific DMS538 website, with a self-contained and working navigation scheme, which will be hosted on each student’s own web server space. Most often, this server will be the UB student server—all students are allotted 15MB of space for a website, which is not enough for most major online multimedia projects, but if mostly unused should have more than enough space for our online experiments. Exercises will be demonstrated in lab, but there is not always time during the lab sessions for each finish to finish the work. You will need to put in more than just classroom and lab time to really learn this material. The final project is a major portion of the grade, and will consist of a major project incorporating some or all of the technologies covered. Students will post project proposals on their course websites, which will be approved by the instructor, allowing for a large range of flexibility in approach, technologies used, and final product. Lab fee $100.

DMS 546 Interface Design
Why do computer-based products succeed or fail? Many factors play into this equation, but one critical factor is interface of interaction design. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how humans use computers. Knowledge in this area is essential to producing successful computer programs. This class will explore current topics in HCI and interface design while developing computer-based products in a group environment with a focus on developing a user-friendly interface. Students in this course should have Basic Digital Arts or the equivalent and be familiar with either Web production or Macromedia Director. $100 lab fee.

DMS 528 Sociable Web Media
What defines the future of the Internet? The strategic tag cloud of tomorrow includes terms like The Internet of Things, RFID, Web2.0, Grid Computing, LambdaRail, Internet2 and many others. Social Web Media maps online group formation and emerging computing technologies that amplify cooperation and distributed creativity. While most of the theory in this field is dominated by entrepreneurial management rhetoric, we will focus on independent social web media in the cultural sector. What is worth defending about the current end-2-end Internet? The middle-class household Internet of the developed world enables a culture of sharing in the unregulated commons, free culture (i.e. file sharing, open source culture), cultures of participation and generosity (i.e. citizen journalism, open archives, open journals, knowledge repositories), and network culture (i.e. the ability for self-organized social networks to form). Today, more often than not we are users *and* producers online. A proficiency in creative social web media is a key skill for the next decade. After successful completion of this course you will become an active participant in online social networks. The course will give you a deeper practical, historical, theoretical, and political understanding of Social Web Media. Lectures will alternate with class discussions, video screenings, and audio talks.

ART 550 Design for New Media
This hands-on course focuses on the role and importance of effective design within the digital interface. It explores the fundamentals of visual communication: gestalt principles, visual syntax, clarity, symbol systems, and the integration of text, images and visual information. Methods are introduced for analyzing data and information in order to make them effective as visual communication.