Introduction:
"Color and Meaning" is an immersive and innovative learning website aimed to empower learners to create captivating brand logos by exploring and combining the impact of color on different aspects of art, psychology, and design. Through the use of four progressive logo design activities, learners will delve into the world of color and examine the meaning it brings including color schemes, emotional experiences, and conveyed meanings.
This website employs a constructive pedagogy approach that combines color psychology, brand analysis, and practical logo design projects to create an engaging learning experience. Through this program, learners have the opportunity to actively construct their knowledge by applying theoretical concepts in a real-world setting. They engage personally in the process of logo creation, brainstorming, making decisions, solving problems that they encounter, and reflecting on their designs. This type of proactive participation contributes to deeper retention and understanding of the concepts learned.
Epistemic framing:
In this course, students have acquired knowledge of the creation and elements of color, which is knowledge about the natural world. When it comes to the relationship between human beings and color, the most basic thing is that color stimulates the human eyes. Students are expected to understand the color scheme beneath vision to the level of emotions, thoughts, and symbols, which is learning knowledge about the human psyche. This knowledge is not taught in a boring way but in the context of real-world brand logos, where the color scheme is often related to goods and services. Logo design has iconic elements in addition to color schemes, and through case studies, students explore how to use colors and symbols to design a logo that best matches the tone of the brand. At this level, the knowledge is expanded to marketing and branding, which means that students are learning knowledge about the human-designed world.
From the natural world to the mental world, to the design world, student learning knowledge is a layered, interlocking process, these three are not isolated from each other, and there are no clear boundaries. The output of the students to design a logo for the brand is an attempt to solve the real-world problem. What is not apparent in the short term throughout project-based learning is the enhancement of students' aesthetic skills and in-depth insights into specific phenomena, which is the knowledge about the eternal world.
Pedagogical design:
The topic of the project could be applied in reality for the color cognition course, which is brand logo design. Students are expected to master the concepts of color and understand the culture of the brand itself and how the culture relates to the brand logo. Students could deepen their understanding of color and enrich their knowledge reserve through interdisciplinary learning so that they could easily understand how color is used in life and understand what the meaning of such application is.
Bloom's Taxonomy is adopted as a reference for designing our teaching activities. In the section on Remembering and Understanding, a video introduction and a short quiz are both used to let students understand the basic concept of color and how color psychology can be applied in marketing. In the part of the case study and brand logo analysis report, students are expected to reach level 3 and level 4: Applying and Analyzing; at the end of this project, students would create their own logo design, which could be level 6: creating. In addition, evaluation standards are set for the logo design and the quiz, which could be level 5: evaluating.
In order to enable students to complete the final project, this project is divided into two themes, the basic concepts of color and color psychology in marketing, and brand logo analysis, and arranged related learning activities in activities 1 and 2. Through the study of these two parts, students could obtain all the knowledge needed for the final project and complete the brand logo design.
Contextual Shaping:
In contextual shaping, our team aims to help students enhance their understanding of social beauty, natural beauty, and artistic beauty. The technological aspect our team has considered is that students have already understood light and color and have a preliminary understanding of color elements and color psychology. Students have the ability to distinguish colors and reshape product logos. At first, students are required to complete a poster about beverage brand product design at the end of the course. However, the poster design is not just about color schemes, but also about fonts, illustrations, typography, and more. Considering their current level of ability, the scaffolding for students is not sufficient to support their output of poster designs. Therefore, students are required to complete an innovative design of a brand logo after class. In the cultural aspect, well-known Chinese and international beverage brands are selected as learning materials, hoping to use the color matching of brand logos to show students the meaning of brand design in different cultural backgrounds.
Throughout the course design, students' known knowledge of light and color is used to introduce the color combinations of various commonly used brand logos in daily life. Students are expected to experience the combination of color and life in the classroom, stimulate their creativity and imagination, and encourage them to brainstorm new works using their known knowledge of color.
Conclusion：
The most difficult part of the IPL creation process was determining the theme. We changed the theme four times in total, from "density of matter" to "light and color" to "brand color matching" to "brand logo design". From "Density of Matter" to "Light and Color" to "Color Matching for Branding" to "Logo Design", not only did we go from a physics class to an art class, but also we narrowed down from very vague concepts to specific themes by degrees. In this process, for epistemic, we gradually realized that teaching should start with small concepts and accumulate them bit by bit. Teachers should guide the students in the learning process to help them connect different small knowledge points, and finally build a knowledge framework to form a complete knowledge system. In addition, for pedagogical， it is difficult for students to form an impression of their knowledge if they simply talk about the concepts when conducting teaching activities, so teachers should give examples to guide students. For example, when designing a logo, if students are only told about warm and cool color combinations without being taught any examples, they will find it abstract and difficult to apply. The creation of IPL has brought us more than the above, and we will apply these valuable lessons to our subsequent teaching activities.