|
It's all in the perception
At Ohio State University's Department of Design, Associate Professor Paul Nini teaches his students that creating visual communications others can interpret effectively adds power and duration to their work. With this in mind, audience testing is a major part of his students' education. When they take Nini's Intermediate Visual Communication Design course, they focus on creating corporate identity programs that readily communicate brand characteristics to customers, and they learn how to test their work with potential audiences.
Design research for all disciplines
OSU's Department of Design comprises three related disciplines: Visual Communication, Industrial, and Interior Design. At the end of their freshman year, students submit portfolios and compete for entry into the programs, and each accepts about 20 per cent of their applicants. The students from all three disciplines begin their studies in the sophomore year with common courses, and often conclude their education working in cross-discipline teams on special projects. All students in the Department of Design purchase laptops and their own Adobe® Creative Suite software, and they all study design research methodology and approaches to collaborating with users. The Department selected the Creative Suite more than a year ago as the standard toolset for graphic creation because of the tight integration of the products, making it easy for students to learn each application and to use them together.
Hand skills for initial concepts
Nini's course requires students to select an industry of interest and survey competing organizations within that category, examining their identification devices. The students define objectives for a theoretical business and a list of desirable attributes they want their visual mark to communicate. Then students create initial concepts, hand-drawing multiple sketches. Following a class critique, the students select just three concepts and develop them further. As an example, design student Jeff Walters' process board shows the development of his initial concepts for a mark for a hotel that emphasizes freedom, peace, tranquility and simplicity.
Jeff Walters' process boards (PDF: 5.3M)
The pure visual form
Following another class critique, the students narrow their focus to one final visual form for the mark and refine it, recreating their graphic in Adobe Illustrator CS3®. Nini insists initially that students work only with visual forms, because they may be the only brand component accessible to non-English-speaking audiences in an international context. Once their mark is refined, students begin audience testing. They survey individuals, asking them to rank various brand characteristics communicated by the form. Student Adam Fromme's process board, created with Adobe Illustrator, demonstrates the rankings that audiences interpreted from the graphic he created for a firm that makes clothing for mountain climbers.
Adam Fromme's process boards (PDF: 4.8M)
Creating ID systems with signatures
Based on audience response, the students will further refine the visual form and design variations in consultation with Nini. They present their work to the class for critique and then begin to focus on "signatures," combinations of the mark with a logotype. The students must define a visual identification system with two variations of the signature. The system includes a typographic grid structure specifying the standard height and width proportions for the mark, the signature variations, and the signature applied to two-dimensional objects like a letterhead or brochure cover. Student Meredith Reuter demonstrates her final signatures for AirPersona, a fictional airline, on presentation boards created with Adobe Illustrator. Anthony Paul used Adobe Photoshop CS3® to assemble elements of his presentation boards showing the signature for Alaska Cab applied to letterhead and business cards.
Anthony Paul's process boards (PDF: 1.0M)
Meredith Reuter's process boards (PDF: 2.0M)
Moving from 2-D to 3-D and more
Students are also asked to apply the signatures to three-dimensional objects and four-dimensional (time-based) communications. Jeff Walters used Adobe InDesign CS3® to create presentation boards for Milieu Miami, showing the signature both on letterhead, brochures, web sites, magazine advertisements and three- and four-dimensional items like the hotel façade, private-labeled toothpaste tubes, vans, and an animation sequence.
Meredith Reuter shows her signatures applied to the AirPersona company headquarters and one of its airliners.
The power of audience research
Nini's students learn to create visuals that are not only attractive, but truly effective in communicating to their audiences. They learn proven techniques for assessing the communication power of their visual concepts and use that data to refine their creations. They also apply their knowledge of audience research to all the projects they tackle throughout their design educations and their professional work.
|
