An art and design university is a particular kind of "semiotic landscape," comprised of teachers and students heavily invested in the difference that non-linguistic modes of expression make to meaning and human experience. Here both experienced and emerging creative practitioners experiment with the signifying possibilities of, for example, wood, light, movement, paint, clay, or digital media. Written English, as a mode of inquiry, research, and composition finds itself somewhat of an outsider in this landscape--at least more so than in a conventional university. It is from this outside territory of a writing pedagogue at an art and design university that the author's inquiry emerges. In this research, the author aims: (1) to identify, analyze, and assess models of multimodal pedagogy that have the potential for developing composition skill learning within the context of a liberal arts curriculum in a Canadian art and design university; and (2) to determine the contribution of art and design university-specific, multimodal pedagogy models to recent research in the fields of multimodal literacy, language and literacy education, and postsecondary writing pedagogy. The author juxtaposes an analysis of a sample of recently published American and Canadian composition instruction books that encourage multimodal literacy in the context of a postsecondary, language-based curriculum with an analysis of how multimodality is manifest in one area of the art and design curriculum at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), a Canadian art and design university. With respect to this juxtaposition, the author aims to discover how her sample multimodal curricula fits--or doesn't--with OCAD as a specific "semiotic landscape." By looking at student thesis work, the author tries to develop a provisional sketch of the nature of her home institution's "semiotic landscape." (Contains 5 figures and 5 endnotes.)