Time-Based Design

Course Description

Time-Based Design is the upper-division graphic design course in which the page starts moving. It takes a student who can compose in two static dimensions and adds the fourth: timing, sequence, transition, sound, and the way meaning is built up over a duration rather than taken in at a glance. In the Florida statewide course numbering system it sits at GRA3139C, an integrated lecture-and-studio course carrying 3 credits.

The statewide description is unusually direct about why the course exists. Time-based design, it says, runs "from website to television broadcasts to motion picture," and it requires "a definitive knowledge of graphic design principals, animation fundamentals, and the basic concepts of motion." It then makes the argument for the subject: "when used properly motion can effectively add another dimension of action and excitement as well interactivity and meaning that can serve to better communicate a message." Motion is treated as a communication tool, not as decoration — which is the distinction that separates this course from a software tutorial.

The University of West Florida teaches it as work in "time and movement, elements of the moving image, serial, sequential, and narrative ordering, moving image editing, sound and image relations, as well as object and event analysis," with aesthetic, technical, historical and conceptual issues addressed through lectures, demonstrations, exercises, projects, screenings, research and readings. The University of North Florida carries it under the statewide subject name.

⚠ Three institutions, two course numbers, one subject

This course is a clean example of a Florida numbering pattern that catches transfer students out, so it is worth stating plainly:

Identifier	Carried by	Their title
GRA3139C	University of North Florida	Time-Based Media
GRA3139C	University of West Florida	Motion Graphics
GRA3139 (no suffix)	Florida A&M University	Time Based Design

No institution carries both forms. That is the signature of one course filed two ways rather than of two different courses: the suffix here records a filing decision by each institution, not a difference in what is taught. All three carry it at 3 credits, and all three descriptions point at the same subject. ⚠ The practical consequence: an evaluator matching on the identifier alone can see a mismatch where there is none. If you are transferring between these institutions and the number does not line up, say so explicitly and send the syllabus.

⚠ A title that is narrower than the course behind it

UWF calls this course Motion Graphics, but its own description is broader than that title. Motion graphics — animated type and graphic elements, title sequences, broadcast identity, UI motion — is one application of time-based design. UWF's description also covers narrative ordering, moving-image editing, sound-and-image relations and the moving image as an expressive form, which reaches beyond motion graphics into time-based media generally.

Read this as a title that undersells the course, not as a narrowing of it. If you are choosing the course from a title, or having it evaluated from one, the statewide name — Time Based Design — describes the content more accurately than UWF's own catalogue title does.

⚠ The description assumes prior work that the prerequisite does not require

UWF's description opens "A further articulation of the techniques and components of time-based media design" — the language of a second course. Yet neither UWF nor the statewide record lists any prerequisite at all.

The gate is open, so you can register without prior motion work; but the description tells you what the course expects you to walk in with. Arrive with working competence in the Adobe toolset, a solid grounding in composition and typography, and some exposure to editing. Students who arrive able to design a static page but who have never worked on a timeline meet two learning curves simultaneously — the software and the temporal thinking — and the software is the lesser of the two.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply graphic design principles — hierarchy, composition, typography, colour — to work that unfolds over time rather than being read at once.
• Demonstrate animation fundamentals: timing, spacing, easing, anticipation, follow-through, and the difference each makes to how motion reads.
• Build and control a project on a timeline using keyframes, and diagnose why a movement reads as mechanical or unconvincing.
• Use serial, sequential and narrative ordering to structure a message across a duration.
• Edit moving image material with deliberate control of rhythm, pace and transition.
• Integrate sound and image, and account for what sound contributes to the perception of timing.
• Storyboard and produce an animatic before committing production time to a sequence.
• Produce finished time-based work to correct technical specification — frame rate, aspect ratio, duration, format — for a stated delivery context.
• Analyse existing time-based work critically, in aesthetic, technical, historical and conceptual terms.

Optional Outcomes

• Design kinetic typography in which the movement carries part of the meaning of the words.
• Produce a broadcast or streaming title sequence or channel identity package.
• Design interface motion — transitions and micro-interactions — and account for reduced-motion accessibility settings.
• Work with compositing techniques: masks, track mattes, blending, basic keying.
• Situate the work historically, from experimental and abstract film through to contemporary screen design.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Design in time — what changes when a composition has a duration, and why static design intuitions mislead.
• Timing and spacing — the core of whether motion reads as alive or as a slide transition; easing curves and velocity graphs.
• Animation principles adapted from character animation to graphic and typographic elements.
• The keyframe workflow — layers, transforms, parenting, nesting and pre-composition.
• Elements of the moving image — frame, shot, cut, transition, and continuity across them.
• Editing and rhythm — pacing a sequence; cut on action, cut on sound, and the effect of duration on attention.
• Sound and image relations — synchronisation, sound as a timing cue, and the way audio changes how motion is perceived.
• Narrative and sequential ordering — building meaning across a series rather than within a frame.
• Storyboarding and animatics — planning before production, and why it saves the bulk of the work.
• Output and delivery — frame rates, resolutions, aspect ratios, codecs, compression, and rendering for web, broadcast and screen.
• Screenings and critique — analysing existing work as the main vehicle for developing judgement.

Optional Topics

• Kinetic typography and the specific problem of type that must remain legible while moving.
• Title sequence and broadcast identity design — the tradition running from Saul Bass to contemporary streaming idents.
• Motion in interface design — transitions, state changes, micro-interactions; motion as feedback rather than ornament.
• Accessibility in motion — vestibular disorders, the prefers-reduced-motion setting, and flashing-content thresholds.
• Compositing and visual effects basics; 3D layers and camera moves.
• Data-driven and generative motion, including expressions and scripting.
• History — abstract and experimental film, the title-design tradition, early broadcast graphics.

Resources & Tools

• Adobe After Effects — the industry-standard motion graphics application and almost certainly the core tool of the course.
• Adobe Premiere Pro for editing; Adobe Audition for sound; Illustrator and Photoshop for asset preparation.
• Design for Motion, Austin Shaw — the most widely used text written for motion design specifically rather than for animation generally.
• The Animator's Survival Kit, Richard Williams — the reference for timing and spacing; written for character animation but the principles transfer directly.
• Motion Graphic Design: Applied History and Aesthetics, Jon Krasner.
• Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve (free tier) — a capable editing and grading alternative.
• Figma and similar tools for prototyping interface motion.
• The Art of the Title archive, for studying title sequences shot by shot.
• ⚠ Storage and machine specification matter in this course in a way they do not for static design. Rendering is time-consuming, project files are large, and working from a slow external drive will cost you hours. Plan backup deliberately — a lost project file late in a term is not recoverable by working harder.

Career Pathways

• Special Effects Artists and Animators (SOC 27-1014) — the primary occupational category for motion design.
• Graphic Designer (SOC 27-1024) — motion is now an expected part of the general design skill set rather than a specialism.
• Art Director (SOC 27-1011).
• Film and Video Editor (SOC 27-4032).
• Web and Digital Interface Designer (SOC 15-1255) — interface motion.
• Producer and Director (SOC 27-2012) in broadcast and content production.
• Florida context: the state has a substantial media production base. Orlando's theme-park and attraction industry commissions large volumes of screen content and in-park media; Miami is the centre of Spanish-language broadcast in the United States (Telemundo and Univision both operate major facilities there), which sustains steady broadcast-graphics and promotional-motion work; and advertising and agency work across Tampa, Miami and Orlando increasingly expects motion deliverables alongside static ones. ⚠ Motion work is also the part of the design field with the most established remote and freelance market, which matters if you are not near one of those centres.

Special Information

Course format and hours

An integrated lecture-and-studio course. 60 contact hours is published here, Florida's convention for a 3-credit C course; no carrier publishes a contact-hour figure, so that number is derived rather than sourced. ⚠ Expect the real time commitment to exceed it substantially. Rendering is unattended but not instantaneous, revision in motion work is slower than in static work because every change has to be re-watched in real time, and the iterative loop of adjust-render-review does not compress.

Offering Notes

Two Florida public institutions carry this exact identifier, both at 3 credits; a third carries the same subject under the unsuffixed number. No institution publishes contact hours.

• University of North Florida (UNF) — Time-Based Media, 3 credits. ⚠ UNF's course catalogue is not machine-readable and its archived catalogue PDFs are blocked, so UNF's own description and prerequisite could not be read directly; the title and credit value here come from the statewide record.
• University of West Florida (UWF) — Motion Graphics, 3 credits. College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Art and Design. No prerequisite. ⚠ May be repeated for up to 9 semester hours of credit.
• Florida A&M University (FAMU) — Time Based Design, 3 credits, under the unsuffixed number GRA3139. ⚠ FAMU's catalogue platform serves its front pages but returns empty responses for course content, so its description could not be read.

⚠ The repeat allowance, and what it tells you

UWF allows this course to be repeated for up to 9 semester hours — that is, taken three times for credit. Two things follow. First, this is genuinely useful: a student who wants to specialise in motion can build a body of work across three terms rather than one. Second, and less obvious, a repeatable course is normally one whose content varies by term and instructor — so the transcript line conveys little about what was actually covered. ⚠ A receiving institution or an employer evaluating the credit will ask, and your reel and project files are the only real record. Keep them, and keep the briefs that went with them.

⚠ Confirm how many repeats your own degree programme will count. A repeat allowance published against a course is a ceiling set by the institution; it is not a promise that your degree wants three of them, and credits beyond what a degree requires can attract Florida's excess-hours provisions.

Transfer and articulation

Credit carries the ordinary Florida guarantee — it transfers to an institution offering the same course. ⚠ With three carriers split across two numbers, that condition is weaker than it sounds, and the number mismatch described above is the likeliest point of friction. Send a reel, not a transcript line. In time-based work the finished pieces are unambiguous evidence of what you can do, and every department evaluating this credit will be more persuaded by three finished sequences than by a course title.

Position in the curriculum

This is a 3000-level course and sits after the design foundations — introduction, typography, and a studio course — even where no prerequisite formally requires them. It feeds portfolio and senior studio work directly, and at UWF it is one of the natural places to generate the moving-image component of a graduating portfolio. Take it early enough that you can use the repeat allowance if you want to.

Dual enrolment and general education

This is an upper-division course and is not a general-education course; no Gordon Rule or general-education designation is recorded against it. It is marked available for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit, which is the default across almost the whole GRA prefix at this level and therefore says nothing particular about this course.

AI Integration

Motion design is being changed by generative tools faster than most areas of graphic design, and a student taking this course now will work in a field where the tools are genuinely useful and genuinely oversold at the same time.

Where the tools are already part of professional practice: rotoscoping and masking that once took hours of manual work is now substantially automated; audio-driven tools transcribe speech and generate captions, which is ordinary production work rather than a novelty; upscaling, frame interpolation and denoising are routine; background removal and object tracking are reliable enough to depend on; and text-to-video generation is usable for concept and pitch material even where it is not yet usable for final delivery.

Where they fail, and it bears directly on what this course assesses:

• ⚠ Timing is exactly what the tools do not give you control over. The heart of this course is timing and spacing — the difference between motion that reads as intentional and motion that reads as mechanical. A generated clip has whatever timing it has; you cannot open its velocity graph and ease a curve. The one skill the course exists to build is the one the tool withholds.
• Generated motion is not editable in the way a composition is. A client note — "same thing, two seconds shorter, and hold on the logo" — is trivial on a timeline and close to impossible on a generated clip, which has to be re-rolled and will come back different in other respects too. Professional motion work is mostly revision, and revision is where generated assets break down.
• Type is unreliable in generated imagery. Text rendered by image and video models is frequently malformed, and in a discipline where typography is half the craft that is disqualifying for final work.
• Consistency across a sequence is the standing weakness. A brand identity, a title sequence and a UI motion system all depend on elements behaving identically from shot to shot. Generated material drifts.

Rights and clearance are a working concern here, not a theoretical one. Motion projects combine footage, music, sound effects, type and imagery, and each has its own licence. Generated assets add a live and unsettled question about the provenance of training material and about what rights you can pass to a client. ⚠ For any work you intend to publish, put in a portfolio, or hand to a client, keep a record of where every asset came from and under what licence. Several Florida employers in broadcast and theme-park media now require exactly that disclosure.

Academic integrity: follow the policy your instructor sets, and disclose tool use. The specific risk in this course is that generated material can hide the absence of the skill being assessed — a polished sequence that the student cannot re-time, re-cut or explain. Be able to open your project file and justify your timing decisions.

⚠ At UWF, the department carries GRA4146 AI for Creative Design, a 3-credit course on integrating these tools into design practice, offered concurrently with the graduate GRA5148. If this is where your interest lies, that is the course built for it — and note that taking the undergraduate version may prevent you taking the graduate one for credit later.