Teaching Graphic Design to future professionals is to prepare them to enter a practice that is constantly changing, demanding new contemporary approaches and outcomes. Therefore, promoting the importance of adaptation and resourcefulness, while fostering in students the capacity to grow into a lifestyle full of creative habits and problem-solving skills, will surely have a positive impact on their competitiveness in this field.
My goal is to create for my students an environment open to collaboration and fair opportunity throughout brainstorming strategies and critiques. I motivate the group to become a community itself by actively sharing ideas and growing trust. In the end, collaboration in design is indisputable. I invite students to develop a unique voice and creative confidence by learning to be open to peers’ feedback as much as giving respectful and thoughtful criticism and by participating in open group discussion as well as one-on-one personalized guidance.
I provide the students with theorical introductions of each project, displaying relevant examples for the specific project to describe how it can be related to a real client/product/service scenario, reviewing some of the historical and cultural aspects of Graphic Design and its applications. My goal is for students to understand design as a revolutionary tool that shapes the world, a goal essential for their education, allowing them to portray themselves in the role they will later play within the design community. I encourage research with assigned readings and complementary writing assignments. I advise students to use and explore design resources available either through the University or outsourcers to complement their learning experience.
I am an advocate for design process. My projects require a constant flow of ideas supported by sketches, iterations, and hands-on experimentation. All Ideas -good or bad - are always welcome and accepted as part of the creative process. I teach my students not to get discouraged by what we think failure is or creative blockages are, since we can only learn design by designing. I assure them there’s no muse to be waiting for, but only discipline and persistent practice will allow designers to produce better concepts, better executions, to develop a much cleaner craft and become well-rounded visual communicators overall. I see my Graphic Design class as a laboratory where students are allowed to experiment with a wide range of media, incorporating a combination of analogue hand-crafted techniques and digital techniques into their making, enabling them to explore interdisciplinary approaches, a space where design vocabulary and tools permeate their knowledge. In this space, there’s a huge gear empowering their curiosity and passion.
As a Visual Communication educator, I’m always seeking to influence my students into becoming critical thinkers, to form strong concepts, and to generate meaningful visual narratives, translating abstract concepts onto their own visual interpretation. A strong concept is the pillar for good functional design; a strong concept would allow them to work with flexibility, either in harmony with design rules or breaking those rules for their own advantage. Without a strong concept and foundations, function becomes merely a house of cards. To generate good graphic design concepts, we need to make functional connections between language, meaning and form, forging unexpected relationships between language and visual systems.
It is part of my methodology to urge my students to have a look at contemporary issues, subject matters as social responsibility, environmental issues, social justice. Helping them to articulate a clear opinion of what is happening in the world, drawing upon their own diverse experiences and understandings, will enrich their character and awareness as communicators, while pushing their limits to reclaim their identity and voice. As I allow them to incorporate their own authentic identities into their work, they will discover aspects of themselves they may not have even been aware of and acknowledge their contribution to the world, as designers and as members in society, ready to engage. It is this belief in the transformative power of education that is the guiding principle of my pedagogy.