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Overview
Overview
VCE Visual Communication Design focuses on visual language’s role in communication, problem-solving, and behaviour influence. Students manipulate type and imagery for specific purposes, audiences and contexts, combining manual and digital methods with with design elements and principles. They learn how aesthetics contribute to effective communication and design resolution. Students explore how designers visually communicate concepts in messages, objects, environments, and interactive experiences. They address design problems to improve services, systems, spaces, and places, using the design process, thinking strategies, drawings, models, and prototypes. Students participate in critiques considering factors like good design, aesthetics, and socio-cultural influences. Human-centered, ethical, sustainable, and culturally appropriate practices are considered. The study aims to nurture future-ready designers by providing them with the knowledge, skills and dispositions required of a multidisciplinary designer who is a reflective, responsible and empathetic practitioner equipped with agency and initiative.
What type of projects to expect?
Folio documentation of the design process; creation of finished designs e.g. brands, logos, illustrations, posters, flyers, brochures, visual merchandising, publications, signage, displays, objects, packaging, aps, icons, websites, visual interfaces, products, interiors, buildings and other structures; exercises focussing on developing skills and knowledge in observational and technical drawings, as well as, professional computer aided design software; visual analysis tasks.
What future pathways there exist?
VCE Visual Communication Design provides pathways to tertiary courses in design, e.g. Graphic/Communication Design, Industrial/Product Design, Architectural Design, or Advertising and Marketing; design-related studies, e.g. Mechanical, Production and/or Civil Engineering; as well as, other areas of the construction industry requiring an understanding of visual communication.
Using the Double Diamond Design process
Using the Double Diamond Design process
Visual Communication Design: Unit 1
Visual Communication Design: Unit 1
Overview
Finding, reframing and resolving design problems
In this unit students are introduced to the practices and processes used by designers to identify, reframe and resolve human-centred design problems. They learn how design can improve life and living for people, communities and societies, and how understandings of good design have changed over time. Students learn the value of human-centred research methods, working collaboratively to discover design problems and understand the perspectives of stakeholders. They draw on these new insights to determine communication needs and prepare design criteria in the form of a brief.
Unit 1 focuses on the design of messages and objects, while introducing the role of visual language in communicating ideas and information. Students participate in critiques by sharing ideas in progress and both delivering and responding to feedback. Students learn to apply the Develop and Deliver phases of the VCD design process and use methods, media and materials typically employed in the specialist fields of communication and industrial design. Student projects invite exploration of brand strategy and product development, while promoting sustainable and circular design practices. They also consider how design decisions are shaped by economic, technological, cultural, environmental and social factors, and the potential for design to instigate change.
Areas of Study
Reframing design problems
Solving communication design problems
Design’s influence and influences on design
Download > VCE Visual Communication Study Design
Unit Assessment
A report or presentation exploring conceptions of good design.
A folio of work demonstrating the VCD design process to create visual language for a business or brand.
A folio of work demonstrating the VCD design process, and using circular design practices to develop a sustainable object.
Examination.
Pathways
Graphic Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Product Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design
Visual Communication Design: Unit 2
Visual Communication Design: Unit 2
Overview
Design contexts and connections
This unit, students draw on conceptions of good design, human-centred research methods and influential design factors as they revisit the VCD design process, applying the model in its entirety. Practical tasks across the unit focus on the design of environments and interactive experiences. Students adopt the practices of design specialists working in fields such as architecture, landscape architecture and interior design, while discovering the role of the interactive designer in the realm of user-experience. Methods, media and materials are explored together with the design elements and principles, as students develop spaces and interfaces that respond to both contextual factors and user needs.
Connections between design, time and place are also central to the study of culturally appropriate design practices in Area of Study 2. Students learn about protocols for the creation and commercial use of Indigenous knowledge in design, with a particular focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander design traditions and practices. Students also consider how issues of ownership and intellectual property impact the work of designers across contexts and specialist fields.
Areas of Study
Design, place and time
Cultural ownership and design
Designing interactive experiences
VCE Visual Communication Design Study Design
Unit Assessment
A folio of the VCD design process to present an environmental design solution.
Investigation of culturally appropriate design practices including representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and creation of personal iconography.
A folio of the VCD design process to propose an interface for an interactive digital product, environment or service.
Examination.
Pathways
Graphic Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Product Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design
Visual Communication Design: Unit 3
Visual Communication Design: Unit 3
Overview
Visual communication in design practice
In this unit students explore and experience the ways in which designers work, while also analysing the work that they design. Through a study of contemporary designers practising in one or more fields of design practice, students gain deep insights into the processes used to design messages, objects, environments and/or interactive experiences. They compare the contexts in which designers work, together with their relationships, responsibilities and the role of visual language when communicating and resolving design ideas.
Students explore the Discover, Define and Develop phases of the VCD design process to address a selected design problem. In the Discover and Define phases, research methods are used to gather insights about stakeholders and a design problem, before preparing a single brief for a real or fictional client that defines two distinct communication needs. Students then embark on the Develop phase of the VCD design process, once for each communication need. They generate, test and evaluate design ideas and share these with others for critique. These design ideas are further developed in Unit 4, before refinement and resolution of design solutions.
Areas of Study
Professional design practice
Design analysis
Design process
VCE Visual Communication Design Study Design
Unit Assessment
Outcome 1 SAC + Outcome 2 SAC contributes to 20%
A comparative case study of designers in selected design field(s)
Two practical design exercises documenting emerging skills in selected field(s) of practice.
Outcome 3 SAT Unit 3 and Outcome 1 + 2 from Unit 4 contributes to 50%
Pathways
Graphic Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Product Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design.
Visual Communication Design: Unit 4
Visual Communication Design: Unit 4
Overview
The focus of this unit is on the development of design concepts and two final presentations of visual communications to meet the requirements of the brief. This involves applying the design process twice to meet each of the stated communication needs.
Having completed their brief and generated ideas in Unit 3, students continue the design process by developing and refining concepts for each communication need stated in the brief. They investigate how the application of design elements and design principles creates different communication messages and conveys ideas to the target audience.
Unit Prerequisites
Preferable Visual Communication & Design Unit 1 & 2
Areas of Study
Development, Refinement and Evaluation
Final Presentation
VCE Visual Communication Design Study Design
Unit Assessment
Unit 4 SAT 40%
End of Year Exam 35%
Pathways
Graphic Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Product Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design.
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