Department Head
A welcome from Andrew Shalat, Digital Arts Certificate program department head
Andrew Shalat is an experienced designer and instructor and serves as Digital Arts Certificate program department head. His welcome message for prospective certificate students provides insight into learning digital arts and working as a professional in the field. Read his bio of professional experience.
A Message to Students from Andrew Shalat
What does it mean: digital arts? Is a digital artist different from a regular artist? (And is there such a thing as a regular artist?)
We are designers and artists to the extent that we can recognize and decipher the world around us. Design, it's been said, is the process of taking something from an existing state to a preferred one. That something could be an idea, a message, a color, or a shape. It is an element of language, a form of articulation. And nowadays, most of us create design with digital tools. Increasingly, the media we use as output and delivery of our design is digital media. Welcome to the digital arts.
The courses in the Sessions Digital Arts program cover a range of disciplines from Photoshop digital imaging to traditional drawing to digital illustration with Illustrator. All these courses are woven with a common thread, and a similar intention. We want to give you a skill set and knowledge of creative tools and a sense of context for when and where, and how to use them. We give you a vocabulary in the language of digital visual arts.
The skills you will acquire and refine in the Digital Arts program are not just academic stuffing, they are focused on the real-world needs of employers. These are skills you will use every day in your job as designers and artists and illustrators. And these are skills that will serve you well in finding employment in those fields. So if I wax philosophic here, my outlook is grounded in real work professional, career-oriented experience.
As design students, and art students, we're all of us tourists in a foreign country. At first, we can't speak the language. We come with a basic idea of how to get our wishes across, but in this country, the signs tell us nothing, and the sounds we hear are strange. The words are unfamiliar and we have to point at what we want like children.
After a while, we start to pick things up. Words that were once unrecognizable now begin to make sense, gain meaning to us. We know where to turn right, where to go straight. We begin to understand where the train station is from the signposts that say where it is. We see the address numbers and they make sense. The map is readable. The tools are accessible.
When we begin to speak the language of design, when we start to understand how the various and previously unintelligible forms combine now to show intention, and meaning, we begin to take control, and take ownership of our surroundings.
– Andrew Shalat, Digital Arts Certificate program department head
Digital Arts Certificate program department head 
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