Denver Ad School is a 15-month advertising portfolio school for future art directors and copywriters. Attend in Denver or live online. Leave with the ideas, portfolio, and experience to compete for creative jobs at advertising agencies around the country.
Both DAD programs teach you how to come up with big advertising ideas. The difference is usually where your brain goes first.
Photography. Film. Design. Type. Color. Composition. Visual worlds. You see what an idea could look and feel like before anyone else does.
Stories. Headlines. Scripts. Voice. Culture. Language. You hear the line, find the observation, or know exactly what an idea needs to say.
That's normal. Maybe you design a little bit, maybe you write a little bit. Skip to our 30-second career tests to see which side sounds more like you.
Start now, no regrets later.
We accept new students in the fall and spring, but if you just finished college and want to pause a little bit before doing portfolio school there are some pretty good reasons not to spend the next six months waiting.
Fall is typically our largest incoming cohort. That means more perspectives, more energy, and more art directors and copywriters to partner with, learn from, compete with, and make better work with.
Fall tends to bring in more students coming directly out of college. You're entering with more people who are at a similar point in life and asking a lot of the same questions you are.
A lot of people finish college, send their work around, hear some version of “not quite there yet,” and decide to give it another six months. But six months by itself doesn't fix a portfolio. Six months of briefs, critique, creative partners, and making a ridiculous amount of work does.
Maybe you find a job while you're waiting. Maybe the money is decent. Maybe it's not exactly what you wanted, but you tell yourself it's only temporary and you'll do it for a year and figure things out later and... then life gets comfortable, leaving gets harder, and the creative career you actually wanted keeps moving further away.
If you miss Fall, the next new DAD cohort doesn't begin until Spring. That's a long time to spend thinking about the creative career you could already be working toward.
THE NEXT NEW COHORT AFTER FALL BEGINS IN SPRING.
START YOUR FALL APPLICATION →.
Same tuition whether you attend in Denver or online.
Five quarters of classes, with breaks between each quarter.
Attend in Denver or online. Every single class is taught live.
Small cohorts so instructors actually know you and your work.
A ridiculous amount of practice, critique, and iteration.
Portfolio school in North America at the 2026 Young Ones Student Awards.
👀 Because graduating and being ready for the creative job you actually want aren't always the same thing. 🧠
WHAT DAD DOES
A piece of paper that's proof you finished college.
A website that's proof you can think creatively and make the kind of work agencies actually hire art directors and copywriters to make.
College gave you a broad education, which is part of what makes it valuable.
Drill down deep for 15 months on all the specifics of how to become an advertising art director or copywriter.
You made work for classes, professors, grades, and requirements.
You make advertising ideas for ad agencies, get them critiqued by working agency creatives, kill the weak ones, push the good ones, and keep doing it until your work gets better.
Your school's end goal.
DAD's end goal.
We’re not asking you to spend 15 months doing more of what you just did for four years. DAD is built around the stuff college probably didn’t give you enough of: real-world briefs, creative partners, working agency creatives, presenting ideas, getting brutally useful feedback, making the work better, and doing it all over again.
You’re not here to repeat college. You’re here to finish what college started.
DAD HALL OF FAME
our favorite student work ever
Goated.
Our best work. Our favorite work. All made by DAD students. There’s too much good stuff to show all at once, so every time you visit roll the dice for a different selection from the archive.
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You just saw the work. Here’s the part you don’t see: the reps, the critique, the creative partners, and the people pushing every idea further until the work actually gets good.
DAD students work through roughly 50–60 creative briefs in five quarters. Some become portfolio pieces. A lot don’t. That’s part of the point. Every dead idea teaches you something that makes the next one better.
Classes are live and feedback is direct. You present ideas, hear what isn’t working, defend what is, make changes, and come back with something stronger. Then you do it again. Just like in an agency.
Small cohorts mean you actually know the people you’re working with. Art directors and copywriters partner up, share ideas, push each other, and learn how to make somebody else’s thinking better along with their own.
Your teachers are working creatives. So the standards, references, critique, and expectations come from the advertising industry you’re trying to enter now, not the version of it somebody remembers from fifteen years ago.
There are cheaper programs. Longer programs. Graduate degrees. Schools that have been around forever. You should compare all of them. Compare the work, the teachers, the time, the tuition, and what you actually leave with.
SEE HOW DAD STACKS UP →The reality is, most of our students come to Colorado for 15 months and then leave for a bigger market. You don't come to DAD because you desperately want a job within a 20-minute radius of our building, right? You come here because you want options, and that's exactly what our national agency network provides.
BASED ON CURRENT DAD PLACEMENT DATA / UPDATED REGULARLYGoodby Silverstein & Partners / RPA / Dentsu Creative / Highdive / David&Goliath / BarkleyOKRP / Deutsch / Havas / McCann / Mischief / Saatchi & Saatchi / Leo Burnett / Wieden + Kennedy / Ogilvy / VML / GUT / Mekanism / TBWA\Chiat\Day / and more...
Sit in on a class and take us for a test drive. Seeing us in action is one of the easiest ways to figure out whether the school feels right for you.
SEE THE STUDENTS / MEET AN INSTRUCTOR / WATCH THE CRITIQUE / LOOK AT THE WORK / DECIDE FOR YOURSELF
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Maybe not. If you already have a portfolio that can compete for the art direction or copywriting jobs you want, go apply for them. Seriously.
But a degree and a portfolio do different jobs. Your degree proves you finished college. Your portfolio proves you can think creatively and make the kind of work agencies hire creatives to make. DAD exists for the gap between those two things.
You should. Look at the portfolios of junior art directors and copywriters getting the jobs you want, then compare them to your own work as objectively as you can.
If you think your portfolio is already there, then start applying. But if you start getting feedback that your portfolio isn’t as good as you thought, well, then we're here to get you where you want to be.
There are no guaranteed jobs. We can’t control the economy, agency budgets, or when somebody decides to hire a junior creative.
But what we can control is what you leave DAD with: five quarters of practice, roughly 50–60 creative briefs, constant critique, experience working with creative partners, a portfolio built specifically for the industry, and a national network of DAD creatives already out there working in it.
Don’t take our word for it. Look at the portfolios. Look at the teachers. Compare the tuition, the time, the work, and where graduates end up. Compare us to every other option you’re considering.
Then come visit a class for free and see how DAD actually works. If the work, the people, and the experience don’t convince you, a clever website shouldn’t either.
The application should be more fun than stressful. It takes about 90 minutes, there's no application fee, and we're not grading you on whether you already understand advertising. Show us what you're into. Tell us how you think. Let your personality come through. We want to meet you, not the version of you that you think an admissions person wants to meet.
Fill out the application and show us a few creative things. They don't need to look like professional advertising. We're looking for taste, curiosity, personality, and creative potential.
They're notified when you submit and review applications as they arrive. If they both think DAD could be a good fit, Heather reaches out.
Technically it's a Zoom interview. In reality, it's a laid-back conversation about you, your application, what you're looking for, and whatever questions you want to ask us.
You'll hear from us within 72 hours of submitting your application. If we think DAD could be a good fit, we'll start setting up your conversation with Heather instead of leaving you wondering for weeks whether anyone has even looked at your application.
Yeah, these two beautiful people actually read your application. Your app hits the inboxes of Heather and Jesse the second you smash that submit button. Jesse will probably immediately go through it because he's a nut like that, Heather will get to it after she takes her twin corgi bois for their morning walk.
We don't have some giant anonymous admissions department like at other schools — it's just these two running the show.
Then if they both think DAD could be a good fit for you, Heather reaches out to set up a conversation. Heather is extremely laid back, very easy to talk to, and in Jesse's opinion, a goddamn riot. The conversation isn't designed to make you sweat. It's a chance for us to get to know you and for you to figure out whether DAD feels right.
You don't need every decision figured out before that conversation. Denver or online? Art Direction or Copywriting? Not even sure DAD makes sense for you yet? That's all fair game with Heather, she'll help ya figure it all out.
