The Business of Design

ART 418 · Charleston Southern University · Fall 2026 · Three credits. Prerequisite: ART 318. Meets weekly, August 24 through December 7, with a final meeting in exam week.

Design is the oldest business there is: the shaping of meaning for people, at a price. This course reads the profession's history as the history of human thought — tools, language, consciousness, commerce — from the Gutenberg Bible to the language machine, and asks at every stop the same two questions. What did designers believe? And what did they sell?

The setting is part of the syllabus. At a Christian university, the survey's recurring argument between faith and secular utopia — Chesterton against Russell, Morris against the machine, Wiener's late worry about gadget worship — is not a detour from the business of design. It is the business of design, stated at full length.

Why this course, now

The market you are graduating into has changed shape. The entry-level rung of production work is largely gone; what remains scarce is judgment — taste, provenance, and the ability to say why a thing should exist and what it should cost. That is a liberal-arts problem with a ledger attached, and this course is built accordingly: every week pairs an idea with its business model.

How the course works

Fourteen sessions, in order, from movable type to the model that moves the type itself. The readings live on this platform; your weekly writing is done in its margins. A session has three parts: the era and what it believed, the reading, and the business thread — who paid, what was sold, and what the price argued.

The work

The commonplace book, thirty percent. Weekly annotations on the assigned texts, kept here in the margin. Graded on judgment, not volume.

The position paper, twenty percent, at midterm. What is design for? Argued from the course's sources; the whole Chesterton-to-Russell spectrum is welcome.

The hundred-dollar artifact, thirty percent. Design, price, and actually offer one real thing — a print, a zine, a typeface, a service — and document the ledger. Revenue is evidence, not the grade; the argument for the price is.

The defense, twenty percent, in exam week. Ten minutes on your intended practice, its positioning, and its price list, defended against questions.

Policies

Academic integrity follows university policy, including the explicit statement of permissible AI use that accompanies every assignment. This course's stance is consistent with its subject: the machine is a tool under study — use it, cite it, and be prepared to argue what your judgment added. Attendance, accessibility, and accommodations follow the university's published policies; grades of record live in Blackboard.