Teacher Yang: I graduated from Central America with a bachelor's degree in graphic design, and my graduate student is an American graphic designer. I have been engaged in the education industry for many years. The humble teacher Yang is actually a prince of thought storm. He has helped many students to apply for graphic design or related majors in top international universities such as RCA.
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First of all, the first question is also the most frequently asked question: What is graphic design? And the difference between graphic design and visual communication?
Graphic design conveys information by creating and combining figures, symbols and words. Traditional graphic design is mainly manifested in printing art, such as book binding design, poster design, font design, logo brand image design and so on. From these points of view, graphic design is mostly manifested as 2d planarization, statics and media simplification. However, with the gradual expansion of the scope of modern design, digital multimedia has penetrated into various fields, and the content of graphic design table selection can neither cover some new information transmission media, nor naturally meet the needs of society and designers' design and creation.
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At this time, visual communication design came into being, which is more diversified and multimedia, and even covers various media such as interaction, movies, television and electronic advertisements. You may not know that this word originated from 1960 World Designers' Congress in Tokyo, Japan. In any case, it is the product of the gradual development of graphic design, so graphic design has gradually surpassed its original category and moved towards a wider and wider field.
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In fact, in China and many countries in the world, the word visual communication is equivalent to graphic design, and designers of visual communication are generally called graphic designers. Judging from the current design situation, the main content of visual communication design is still graphic design. They are different from unity in concept category, and there is no contradiction or opposition. Colleges and universities will also have different names because of their own teaching characteristics and emphasis.
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The second question is also a practical problem that students are more concerned about. I want to sum up the prospect of graphic design employment.
We know that graphic design is the basis of all design, and it permeates all aspects of society. What I see and hear most often is really the products related to graphic vision. The so-called great social demand and broad employment prospects, especially sophisticated designers like you, are the key targets for the company to recruit talents. In the future, you can enter online media companies, advertising media companies, TV stations, book publishing houses and so on according to your own interests. With the development of society, it can be said that as long as the position of graphic design in a company is indispensable, even decisive, so don't worry about this problem.
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The third question, which is also the focus of this class, is the preparation of our portfolio. What aspects should be involved in the content of excellent works?
According to my own experience, it should be related to the following aspects: 1 sociality, 2 commerciality and 3 academics. Let me briefly explain these three aspects.
Sociality: Design comes from life, so you should think and discuss the relationship with social life and social culture from a social perspective with the help of design.
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Commerciality: by means of design, usually self-supporting projects, people's consumption needs are met, commercial value is created for corporate brands, and the function, wisdom and value of design are embodied through this behavior.
Academic: This is also the most difficult to grasp. It is often a theoretical problem of this discipline. You express your views through your works and by discussing the theoretical problems of this discipline.
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Having said that, I believe everyone is still confused and can be summarized as the following criteria:
Explanatory power (that is, when you put forward a concept, the coverage of working theory and the degree of explanatory power should have strong theoretical support).
Strangeness (in fact, novelty, the concept of your work can bring forward new facts that other theories have not envisaged or are difficult to explain).
Logical rigor (from concept to logic)
Experimental (dare to design and express your opinions across multiple disciplines and technologies)
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The fourth question, what conditions should a complete project have?
Often when doing a project, many students have no purpose and don't know where to start. In fact, it is a process problem: finding points of interest or events-collecting information, cognition and analysis-outputting research results-putting forward central ideas-previewing drafts-producing finished products. The design process is particularly important, which is also one of the important factors of portfolio evaluation. Seriously speaking, it is the soul of your work and the process of growth. Without it, your work is bound to be empty.
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The last question is also related to the research mentioned above. Why don't you do some research and finally get out of touch with your work?
Students often hold a lot of research materials and say to their teachers: I found that my specific design didn't bring any effect at all. What should I do?
This is because you have only worked as a data collector and a data porter. In the final pretend, you didn't go back and spend time purposefully analyzing and obtaining the research results, and didn't go back to the research from the job requirements to dig deep into the design elements you needed.
Here, I will give a very straightforward and simple example: if you design a children's paper reading book, you will mention some characteristics of children in your research and analysis, such as: active, delicate skin, fragile objects, biting objects, and being interested in brightly colored objects. At this time when you are designing, you will naturally make the following reasonable choices from these analysis results:
The choice of paper (too thin is easy to cut children's hands, maybe the paper is thicker and even needs to be covered with film to prevent dirt and tear), so you will purposefully get the grams and types of paper because of the research results.
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How appropriate is the choice of folio? Are you holding or lying down? ) Here is a direct guide for you to consider the appropriate book size.
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The choice of font (the size of words and improper handling of the density between words may affect children's recognition) will guide you to arrange the font size, word spacing and line spacing reasonably.
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The choice of printing (due to the biting nature of children, this will definitely guide you to choose non-toxic and environmentally friendly ink for printing, etc. )
In this way, your research will induce your thinking and directly and effectively guide the formation of your works.