Friday, December 16, 2005

Lecturing on Corporate Identity – Phase Two


I completed my second day with the third-year students at IADT just before going on my week’s holidays. (Yes, that was one month ago. I composed this post on my Palm and could not complete it due to a few very busy weeks.) I spent a fascinating afternoon reviewing and discussing the student’s solutions to the project’s corporate identity brief. They were commissioned to create the identity for a fictitious nation state.
It is challenging to make the mind-shift from art-directing in the morning to lecturing in the afternoon. It is a new skill for me to master: but one that is rewarding on a number of levels. I found it very encouraging to see how effectively some of the students were able to grasp the overall principles underlying the discipline of corporate identity; particularly given that this was their first opportunity to do so. It was also refreshing to see how willing some of the students were to pursue options far beyond the scope those we would normally have the opportunity to explore in the more accelerated timescales of the professional world. Having such freedom to explore really is the primary opportunity afforded by studying design at third-level. Reality will dictate so many constraints once young designers start working on real-world projects with real budgets.
My only disappointment on the day was that so much of their work was undermined by multiple typos and outright spelling errors. Given that the fusion of words and images sits at the core of the discipline graphic design, I was worried by their seeming inattention to the ‘word’ half of that equation. Although that is a problem I see more and more of in the professional sphere as well. But that can be the topic of another day’s blog post.
(These camera-phone images are a totally arbitrary cross-section of some student’s project work. Therefore probably not covered by this site’s CC licence.)

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