My research centres on the exploration of the Design Corpus: a collection of MA Design student submissions from Kingston School of Art. The study has two main strands – one focusses on the use of images in the wider text as discoursal moves which perform academic functions and document creative processes. This has involved novel approaches in terms of the processing of the images as data; in the development of a taxonomy of image use within the genre; and the use of the image metadata to map layout conventions. The other main strand uses corpus-driven techniques to explore the features of language in this understudied field. This involves focusing on closed-set grammatical keywords to unearth linguistic characteristics which provide insight into the nature of the field.