Deliverables, slide decks, promotional materials, style guides—it’s all conceptual until you have a real client and hard deadline.
Graduating Integrated Design students at The University of Baltimore get a taste of the creative pressure they will experience in a professional setting in Seminar in Publications Design course, one of two capstone courses for the M.A. in Integrated Design program.
Split in teams, they get connected with real clients—their entrepreneurial-minded peers from UBalt’s Merrick School of Business. They have to become experts in that client’s business plan, research competition and market opportunities. Then they design a brand package to support that venture’s growth, explained Jacob DeGeal, the assistant professor who teaches the course.
At the end of the semester, the design teams present their creative plans before a panel of judges. This year’s judges were all alumni of the Integrated Design program: Lilia LaGeese, M.A. ’07, Jill Blum, B.S. ’08, M.A. ’17, and Michael Davenport, M.A. ’24.
“The final presentation challenges the students to provide a succinct overview of those two documents, as well as provide a persuasive argument for how to best position their clients venture in their market,” DeGeal said.
The Erin Kvedar Memorial Seminar Excellence Award goes to the team with the most comprehensive, thoughtful and creative package of materials, he said.
This year’s winners were Ryan Harrison and Kandice Smith, both M.A. ‘26. They won for their brand and communications strategy work on Potomac24. The start-up entrepreneur news website is the brainchild of Sheik Md Akjj, an entrepreneurship fellow with the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
The design students ran into challenges during the project that fueled their passion for good creative work.
“I think the challenge was just understanding,” Smith said. “We don't want to change the prize vision with the headboard as a founder, we just wanted to enhance it, so people get attached.”
Where the design team for Potomac24 had to work on an already established brand, the second design team faced a different challenge. Melissa Baley, Sarah Burstyn and Deniel Edwards, all also M.A. ’26, were helping Cai Davis prepare for his upcoming launch of Tipsy Trips.
Tipsy Trips is a gamified app designed to help people find real-time happy hour deals around Baltimore city.
Davis, also an entrepreneurship fellow, sat in the audience for the presentation, listening closely as the designers explained their thinking. At the end, his biggest message for them was “Thank you.”
“You did open my eyes, so I really appreciate that,” he told his design team.
Davis’ team had a mix of previous experience working with clients on professional design projects. They agreed the biggest value was rooted in working with a real-world client who was also a UBalt student. There was a level of familiarity and understanding across the shared community.
And the biggest lesson? Flexibility.
“You have to be flexible,” Edwards said. “What you think is Plan A or what you might get from the client, you might not get. So, you have to think about what's your plan A, B, C, D, E. You have to be flexible and work with what you’ve got.”
Working in her first design job, Baley said she’s only worked for one client so far. Having this class experience gave her a different perspective.
“It's interesting to see with different people, the different paces that they go at, and the different communication styles and levels of clarity that they give you, and just learning how to embrace ambiguity,” she said.
Burstyn said she appreciated how this culminating class let her unleash her artistic skills more than some of the more foundational courses allowed. This class had just the one project and a whole semester to tinker with it.
“There are three deliverables that are clear, but there's an added level of creativity that we're putting into it and thinking about what will be the most useful for our client,” she said.
In addition to the Seminar Excellence Award earned in this class, two of DeGeal’s graduating students also won program awards at the end of the spring semester.
Harrison earned the Excellence in Design Award, which recognized an outstanding student who creates a visually compelling final portfolio through their work in Portfolio, the second of the two capstone courses in the master’s design program.
Baley received the Ampersand Award, which DeGeal said goes to a student “who exemplifies the spirit of the program with their ability to marry both words and images to your work.”