Senior Jacob Desilets packs his book bag and waves to his teachers. He then boards the bus for a 15-minute ride to Concord Regional Technical Center (CRTC) at Concord High School.

Desilets and other Pembroke Academy (PA) students are enrolled in the vocational graphics design program at CRTC. The program combines text and pictures to create book and magazine covers, advertisements and other personal projects.

While the class focuses mainly on the elements of design, the most important part of graphics design is brainstorming and the overall creative process, said Desilets.

Senior Olivia Rondeau, another PA student attending the program, believes learning about graphics design gives her a new perspective on how layouts work.

“You can make many things with just a few apps,” Rondeau said. “This whole experience is fun, but my favorite part is the creative process.”

For example, one project in the program asked students to redesign the United States currency.

  “Instead of our Founding Fathers on the money, I put our National Parks on it,” said Desilets. “It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun.”

Another project had students creating four scratch tickets.

“They had to look real,” Rondeau said. “It had to already be scratched showing whether or not it was a winner or loser, it used the Adobe Illustrator app.”

The assignments, however, are not without their share of challenges.

“In graphics design, there are a lot of hard tasks that we have to complete,” Desilets said. “What I think is the hardest is drawing free handedly, I can’t draw.”

Rondeau said the hardest part of graphics design was having “to think on [her] toes.”

“Using the computers sound fun, but using them everyday with projects one after the other is hard,” she said. “You either make a really good design or a bad one and you just have to work to improve it.”

While the program is offered solely to juniors and seniors, sophomores have the opportunity to visit the CRTC program in the spring.

Sophomore Hayden Goyette is already showing interest.

“I love creating cool things,” he said. “I have a Youtube channel and I already use photoshop to make my banners. I’m in a class with Ms. Cunningham, and it’s already preparing me.”

Both Desilets and Rondeau recommend the program.

“I would 100 percent recommend this class to anyone who’s interested, but not just this class, any class CRTC provides,” Desilets said, “It gives you a real life feel, and right now in our last year of CRTC we’re in an internship. It’s just a great experience to have on your resumѐ.”