DW200 — One-year DESIGNWORKOUT course

DW200 annual course
September 2025 — May 2026

DW200 is a 200-day program of training thinking and practice with the DesignWorkout® team of designers.

DW200 is a course for practicing designers who want to define their areas of interest in the profession, build on their strengths, and fill gaps in their basic art education.

DW200 is an opportunity to learn the DesignWorkout® team's project approach and apply it to a personal project or a DesignWorkout® research project.

We refer our successful graduates for the positions of designers and art directors in leading companies, and we also engage them in DesignWorkout® projects.

Course structure

Film

Assessment

Prior to the beginning of the course, we ask the participant to fill out a detailed questionnaire, formulate an educational goal, and complete a number of small tasks from the subject areas that make up the course program. Understanding the participant's expectations and relevant issues in the field of design allows us to offer individual assignments that will help the participant acquire the desired skills.

1st semester
Foundations of the profession

Systematization of knowledge and practice in five subject areas: sketching, composition, design thinking, art history, and typography.
Lectures and practical exercises in Zoom+Figma.
Daily subject-specific flashcards on Telegram.

Detailed program of the 1st semester

2nd semester
Specialization

Professional training: typography, interface, layout design, project management.
Theoretical disciplines: sociology, design history, linguistics.
Personal project or research: 6 months of intensive work on a topic of interest to the participant with constant support from the course curators

Detailed program of the 2nd semester

Offline modules

Each semester has offline modules for 3-4 days: ERA, a trip, and Campus, an intensive course at the DesignWorkout® training centre in Moscow.

More about Campus

More about ERA

Film

Curators

The course curators are DesignWorkout® employees, art historians, methodologists, and practicing designers who solve the most complex tasks on culturally significant Russian and international projects. DesignWorkout® works with WorldChess, Postnauka, Polytechnic Museum, Moscow Philharmonic, Tsvetnoy, Context.Diana Vishneva, and others.

curator of thinking and composition

Dima Barbanel

designer, methodologist, creative director and partner at and DesignWorkout®. Graduate of the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (St. Petersburg) and Fabrica (Treviso, Italy).

curator of typography

Vladimir Kolomeytsev

typographer, graphic designer. Graduate of Tagir Safaev's Font and Typography School, graduate of Expert Class Type Design course, Antwerp, and ISIA & Werkplaats Typografie Summer School, Urbino. Curator of typography programs at DesignWorkout®.

curator of sketching

Timur Tkachenko

graduate of the Academy of Arts with a degree in monumental painting. DesignWorkout® employee, author and curator of the Ping-pong sketching online course.

curator of interface

Vadim Kartashev

Product designer, programmer and mathematician, graduate of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University, system architect at DesignWorkout®.

curator of art history and ERA program

Ksenia Malich

architectural historian, PhD candidate in History of Art. Supervised the architectural program at the State Hermitage for 10 years. academic supervisor of the Master's program at the HSE School of Design (St. Petersburg). specialist in the history of architecture of the 19th-20th centuries. Researcher and curator of art history programs at DesignWorkout®.

curator of design history

Pavel Ulyanov

designer, art historian, art collector, founder of the Chair Museum project. Lecturer at the HSE School of Design.

curator of concepts

Yaroslav Rassadin

industrial designer, art-director, design consultant, founder of the KB-Rassadin, co-founder of Bobber brand. Author of articles on design in different publications.

curator of linguistics

Elen Panteleeva

professor, editor, methodologist, graduate of the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. consultant on cultural codes in design, DesignWorkout® employee.

coordinator

Denis Yudin

graphic designer at Masterskaya, product manager, front-end developer, coordinator of the educational process at DesignWorkout.

Methodological basis
of the course

Hard skills

Create

Achieve technical mastery of the tool. Be familiar with the key features of software and other technical tools commonly utilised in the industry. Apply this knowledge to abstract examples.

Create according to the example

Design precisely based on a clearly defined task. Solve technical tasks. Solve the task, having an example of solving a similar technical task. Understand how the solution works, apply it to the task, use ready-made elements, components, and solution fragments. Ensure the quality of technical execution and compliance with rules, logical inaccuracies allowed.

Create according to the rules

Systematically design within the framework of relatively clear and well-formulated tasks. Solve functional tasks. Solve tasks using a general set of rules, components, layout schemes, design system descriptions, and examples of its application that are not directly related to the given task. Ensure functionality, logic, compositional integrity, and compliance with rules. Understand how the system is structured and confidently apply rules to solve different types of problems within the system. Monitor the compliance of solutions with rules and technical implementation.

Create according to the principles

Design new solutions, even if the task is not clearly defined. Solve practical business problems. When necessary, expand the design system with new components, layout schemes, patterns, and examples of application. Create rules. Understand the principles and follow them when designing new approaches. Participate in refining the principles and documenting the system and specific solutions based on them. Ensure that the solutions comply with the principles and rules.

Create principles

Develop an approach to designing. Solve systemic business problems. Conceptualize design approaches to address a specific set of tasks under loosely defined requirements. Describe and communicate rules, create examples of their application across a broad range of challenges, and establish the foundation of a design system. Monitor the evolution of the system, ensuring its adherence to the principles, and overseeing the compliance of rules and specific solutions with those principles. Ensuring the integrity of the system and its solutions. Adjust principles and rules as needed. Know and apply industry best practices. Be familiar with similar industry solutions.

Create something new

Find new approaches to solving typical problems. By understanding and using all of the above, go beyond standard solutions accepted in the industry. Conduct research, use cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural connections to change design paradigms. See opportunities, trends, analogies. Adopt, apply, and develop practices from other disciplines. Conceptualize design as a whole. Develop a vision for your approach to the profession.

Create a knowledge transfer methodology

Conceptualise the principles of design and the methods of teaching them. Break down the learning process into stages, starting from basic skills to specialised expertise. Develop a methodology and training program, as well as create educational materials. Convey theoretical and practical knowledge and ensure its assimilation. Develop methodologies for assessing knowledge and skills. Provide a clear picture of the profession and the possibilities for growth within it. Articulate goals, tasks, principles, and quality criteria for work in the profession. Foster interest in the profession.

Soft skills

Empathy

Love for your neighbour. State of mind that allows you to connect with another person, his world, to understand what they feel, what he cares about. The ability to be open to a stranger, to empathise with them as a full-fledged living soul.

Understanding a person

Theoretical and practical acquaintance with the features of human psychology: thinking, attention, memory, orientation, skills, experience. The habit of observing how people behave in different conditions, how they make decisions, how they act, how they draw conclusions, what is fundamental and immutable, and what can easily be changed and what is important to them and why. Life experience of interacting with people from different spheres of life, different backgrounds, with different experience, in situations of varying degrees of tension, responsibility, and pleasure. Life experience of solving practical tasks in interaction with people, experience of organising collaborative activities, experience in upbringing, teaching, and management.

Working with structure

Ability to organise information into logical structures, order, systematise, group, filter, generalise, name things, establish connections, build hierarchies, place accents, identify gaps, and ask questions. The ability to visualise the structure and coherently present it to others. The ability to describe/or model a real-world subject area using objects, attributes, and connections.

Working with scenarios

Ability to present a solution to a problem as a sequence of steps. The ability to formulate a goal/task for which a person becomes involved in the process, and keep focus on it during the design process. A sense of time, ability to create a sense of narrative and dramatic progression in time-based processes. Understanding how to work with another person's sense of time, guiding and maintaining their attention throughout the process. Understanding the external conditions in which the process takes place. Understanding the relationships between scenarios, branches, constraints, and connections with external processes.

Product thinking

Focus on a holistic result. Approach to designing any artefact as a systemic and holistic process for solving a specific problem. Ability to identify and formulate the problem. Ability to subordinate the results of solving individual subtasks to the main task. Ability to identify and formulate criteria for evaluating the result, collect necessary data, and evaluate the result. Ability to see the solution as an indivisible entity that manifests itself in individual functions or forms.

Systematic approach

Ability to сonnect individual components of a solution into a coherent whole, aligning the components with a common principle. Ability to formulate, justify and implement principles, rules, and guidelines. Ability to explain the system to others. Ability to separate the flexible zones of the system from its fundamental foundation. Ability to build flexible and variational modular systems, divide the whole into reusable parts, and build a component hierarchy. Understanding the tasks of modular design and accepted/typical approaches to their solution in the relevant field of practice.

Understanding the technology

Understanding the technological production process in the relevant field of practice. Understanding technological constraints. Experience in interacting with technologists, ability to speak their language, proficiency in terminology and the basics of technology. Experience in transitioning designed solutions to production, experience in quality control of execution. Ability to collaboratively find a solution with technologists that is not a compromise in terms of user experience.

Inner call to develop community

Program: 1st semester

The foundations of the profession
September–December

During the first half of the course, participants have the opportunity to fill in gaps in their foundational art education and deepen their knowledge across all subject areas.

Film

september 2024

october 2024

november 2024

december 2024

Daily subject-specific flashcards. 5 days a week

Art history. 13 lectures

Sketching. 10 classes

ERA. 3 days

Composition. 12 classes

Typography. 11 classes

Daily flashcards

5 days a week

Curators: Ksenia Malich, Timur Tkachenko, Vova Kolomeytsev, Vadim Kartashev, Dima Barbanel

Art history, design history, design thinking, sketching, typography, composition, interface, sociology, management.

A flashcard is a tool that provides a context, situation, and issue to the participant, which requires them to conduct a mini-study and apply both empathy and crafting skills to solve. These flashcards are posted and discussed in the common Telegram chat by the curators. Solutions from other participants, comments, and curator feedback can help provide a new perspective on the issue and even help you discover your own potential to make effective and unexpected decisions.

Art history

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

13 classes

Curator Ksenia Malich

Culture, social context, economics, technology, geopolitics.

Topics:
Ancient East
Ancient Greece
Ancient Rome
Early Middle Ages
Gothic
Early Renaissance
Late Renaissance
Baroque
Classicism
18th century
19th century. From Empire to Historicism
The birth of Modernism. Art of the last third of the 19th century. Art of the first third of the 20th century
Architecture of the 20th century from modern to postmodernism

Sketching

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

10 classes

Curator Timur Tkachenko

Drawing with pleasure, ease, and freedom. Try out a maximum number of techniques, genres, and formats.

Topics:
Collage. Estrangement
Study of light and shadow. Still life. Sphere Law
Sketchbook. Visual Diary. Analysis of still lifes
Emotion, portrait. Construction, proportion
Linework
Equator of the module. Figure
Stamp. Stencil. Gesture
Groups. Compositional analysis of groups. Space

Composition

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

12 classes

Curator Dima Barbanel

Meaning, metaphor, image, form.

Topics:
Semantics, interpretation, scenario, plot, communication, metaphor
Point, line, plane, space, perspective
Blur, silhouette, shape, counterform, inversion
Contrast, rhythm, dynamics, statics, balance
Symmetry, asymmetry
Figurative, abstraction, formalisation
Scale, modularity, proportions, lines of force
Format, subformat, superformat
Construction, structure, composition, system
Plasticity, tectonics, texture, texture, collage, pattern
Light, colour, tone, saturation, gradient
Density, volume, mass

Typography

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

11 classes

Curator: Vova Kolomeitsev

Font practices.

Topics:
Introduction
History of Writing
Typeface and grid (2 classes)
Modular typeface (2 classes)
Typeface from reference (3 classes)
Typeface archive
Contemporary typography

ERA

Excursions, practice with the curator, studio visit

Tbilisi / Berlin / St. Petersburg / Suzdal / Istanbul / Budapest*

3 days

Curators: Fyodor Knokov, Ksenia Malich

* the exact location of the ERA program will be determined 2 months before it starts. the course program includes an excursion part and practice. accommodation, transport and meals are paid independently by the participant.

Art history through travel and practice.

Together with the guiding curator, we will visit a city to experience the ideas embedded in key design and architectural landmarks and learn how to apply them in project practice.

More about ERA →

Study week example

monday

tuesday

wednesday

thursday

friday

Program: 2nd semester

Specialization: Designer
February—May

Currently, there is a prevailing paradigm of dividing the profession into communication designers and product designers. We do not believe in this division. We believe, and the market is moving towards the understanding that a designer is a professional who systematically understands design as a set of skills and tools, concepts and practices, and is capable of doing any work - both product and communication.

The DW200 course provides participants with the opportunity to try their hand at solving problems of both types through practice in composition and typography (communication part), interface and sociology (product part).

We guide participants towards a systematic understanding of the product and develop the ability to come up with their own product. The participant's personal project, which forms the main part of the course in the second semester, depending on the complexity of the project, may become a completed concept, MVP, or a finished product.

Film

february 2025

march 2025

april 2025

may 2025

Design history: 10 classes

Interface: 8 classes

Project Management: 5 classes

Campus: 3 days

Layout Design: 10 classes

ERA: 3 days

Personal project / participation in the DesignWorkout® research project

Project

Independent work.

Group work.

Curator consultations.

3-day intensive course at Campus*

* three meals a day and accommodation are included in the price

Final year project or participation in the DesignWorkout® research.

* three meals a day and accommodation are included in the price

Design history

1 online class per week, 90 mins.

10 classes

Curator Pavel Ulyanov

Influence of culture, social context, economy, technology, and geopolitics on design, using the evolution of the chair as an example.

Topics:
Evolutionary design. Tradition, design as optimization, cultural and historical pendulum, and the evolution of solutions
Technology. Weaving, bending, laminating, steel tubing, stamping
Construction. Post-and-beam construction, aestheticization of construction, cantilever, self-supporting shell, foam latex
Material. Moulding, ceramics, glass, cast iron, papier-mache, paper, plastic
Function. Ergonomics and anthropometry, compactness, stackability, multifunctionality, accessibility, disassembly
Ornament. Meaningful load, rhythm, texture and pixel, geology and botany, systematisation of ornament, pierced ornament
Form. Anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, biomorphism, organic, surrealism, cubism
Orientalism: China (Chinoiserie), Japan (Japonisme), Egyptian Revival, Asia (Turquerie), Africa (Noir Deco), Mayan Revival
Elementarism. Archaism, Renaissance and Enlightenment, aesthetic movement, Vienna Secession, avant-garde, minimalism
Futurism. Sphere and circle, Italian futurism, space conquerors, World of Tomorrow, Streamline and Space age, living cells, and mobile architecture, Living landscape

Interface

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

8 classes

Curator Vadim Kartashev

Exploring how function and image are connected, and how interfaces assist individuals in communicating with the world, machines, and other people.

Topics:
Introduction. The History of Interface, part 1 (The Dream)
The History of Interface, part 2 (The Dream, Economy, Technology)
Interface theory
The design process

Project management

1 online class per week, 90 mins.

5 classes + consultation hours with the curator

Curators: Dima Barbanel, invited experts

Value proposition: how to help clients solve problems and achieve goals.

Topics:
Business model as a system for creating value
How to develop business models
Customer segmentation as the foundation of a business model
Hypothesis creation practice
Methodology for interacting with clients. Creating a brief. Essence, goals, visual directions
Analysis of the current solution. Introduction to the subject area, brainstorming, idea selection, definition of target users (JTBD), brief for the research and analysis of the results
Product branding and brand strategy: development tools, testing prototypes and approaches
Brand or product communication strategy

Q+A:
Operational reality: positioning, promotion, pre-sales, communication with clients, building a team, hiring and assessment, budgeting, project management, sales, upselling

Layout design

1 online class per week, 120 mins.

5 classes

Curator Dima Barbanel

Exploring how UX, format, proportions, and typography on paper and on the web convey the meaning of a product.

Topics:
Information architecture. Business domain, scenarios and actions, connections, cross-cutting elements, components, functions
Blueprint. Design units. Draft architecture of the product. Assembly and interface components, priorities
Visual concept. Sketches, visual and textual metaphors, UI
Brand and communication concept
Peak form, visual layout. Informational and interface concepts, prototypes, synchronisation of the visual and interface layers, UX
Developing creative briefs for content preparation: product identity elements, typeface, language code, texts, images
Master layout: Format, proportions, “visual” grid, modular system, assembly and layout units, layout schemes
Product assembly
UI kit and guidelines. Components, prototype, documentation, micro-interactions
Handover to development, author's supervision, technological map

ERA

Excursions, practice with the curator, studio visit

Tbilisi / Berlin / St. Petersburg / Suzdal / Istanbul / Budapest*

3 days

Curators: Fyodor Knokov, Ksenia Malich

Art history through travel and practice.

Together with the guiding curator, we will visit a city to experience the ideas embedded in key design and architectural landmarks and learn how to apply them in project practice.

More about ERA →

Registration

Plan

one payment

420 000 ₽

2 payments 220 000 ₽ each

440 000 ₽

4 payments 115 000 ₽ each

460 000 ₽