Design & Media Production at Lanier Tech is a hands-on curriculum: We focus on creating job ready candidates by creating professional level skills. Project work is driven by guidelines that are defined professional standards. Real world projects and livework opportunities are embedded in the curriculum. DMPT students get to make their own portfolios out of real job material. Students learn to generate the quality demanded in the field. All our work moves through the critique cycle to prepare for professional performance. DMPT students at Lanier Tech learn the media creation techniques and technologies that drive the graphics business today.

Larry Nix     Forsyth Campus   lnix@laniertech.edu   Phone: (770) 781-6972   Walt Griffin  Adjunct Instructor   Forsyth Campus   wgriffin@laniertech.edu   Phone: na

Graphic work is about product design: Meeting the communication needs of the customer. Design professionals create graphics that exploit the physical formats used by advertising and communications. Professionals choose and create art. They prepare design materials for use. They create, correct, and composite photography. Everything that they perfect goes into the design of a product. Design is arranging graphics, type, and pictures to forge the product. Good print designers will deliver to the customer's expectations. Better designers find a way to exceed those expectations every time. The product design process is a running loop of communication and creation. It starts with the notions of a customer. The product designer must innovate a solution from a large range of possibilities. They must deliver a product that is both striking and manufacturable. It has to fit into the means of his production facilities. It is a difficult task: they are product engineers twenty times a day. Product designers make bold new strokes with every idea. Every product must demand that the public look, see, think, and remember the ad and campaign of their client. The production process moves a product through all the stages of manufacturing. From the details of every stage of manufacturing, to scheduling multiple tasks on multiple production lines and machines, production is a game of detail, knowledge, and experience.

We have a both design and production labs at Lanier Technical College's Forsyth campus. Our design environment, following with industry standard, is equipped with MacPro workstations running the latest releases of the Adobe CS design package and Mac OSX and a variety of other industry standard software. The Print lab is equipped with standard digital print production, wide format printing, cutting and finishing equipment. All of our computers, software and print equipment are the training and proving grounds for talent. We are about the design and execution of real world graphic products. Curriculum assignments are all continuous running experiments in leading edge technologies. Every new product is an innovation in manufacturing techniques for product design. Learning is doing here: all of the work we do here has a concrete foundation, beginning to end. Graphic designers are the beginning stage of the process of media production. They have to do the initial research and set-up of the appearance of the products in print and on the web. They work from their offices, studios, and even from home. Their technical skills and awareness of current graphic culture and product production technique is their primary tool set for performance in their chosen career. Pre-Press specialist convert graphic designs, and sometimes just bare ideas, into product designs that can be executed en-mass through available imaging and finishing equipment. Pre-press technicians work often out of offices local to or located in the production facilities. They work closely with production, management, and graphic designers to bring together all into a workable, real product. Production specialists work on-site in the manufacturing environment, setting up, maintaining and running equipment. Often deal with both conditioned environments and otherwise. They load and run the machines, and have to deal with moving materials, partially finished and full finished product in and out of the production line. Later in the cycle of their career they become the go-to expert for machine set-up and troubleshooting, and worker training specialist for production lines in the manufacturing facilities.

Students become masters of the Adobe Creative suite: they learn and master the foundation graphics software, PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign. More importantly they learn to apply it to creating real products that are used in the marketing and information campaigns: local businesses, entrepreneurs, startups and, especially, Lanier Technical College itself. The main programs are the Diploma, and Associates of Applied Science. Additional Technical Certificates of Credit are available and can be pursued individually to specialize or update skill sets. The TCCS are also awarded as the courses are completed in the pursuit of the Diploma or Associates Degree. All stages of design and production have to be masters of the tools of the field. The software changes very nearly every year, and the means of production and media are evolving at an accelerated pace. LTCs current production equipment allows us to cover digital imaging with laser and wide format ink-jet printer, thebasics of image carrier technology, folding, finishing and cutting.

Currently employment is picking up. This year alone, several businesses that have employed LTC graduates of DMPT have also called for other candidates from the DMPT program to fill their needs. This has been the pattern: Once the business has a chance to understand and appreciate the abilities of one graduate, they want more of the same skills, innovation, and determination. They find whatthey need to meet their industrial production goals and drive their profits up and business forward.