Visual Communication Design

About

Become an expert on visual storytelling with this summer course. You'll explore communication design across various contexts, technologies, and media, with a strong focus on enhancing the audience experience.

Explore storytelling as a process of meaning-making, covering a wide range from traditional narrative structures to experimental non-linear and associative forms, as well as non-narrative poetic expressions.

The course prioritises hands-on experimentation and practice-based learning that can be applied to various design processes rather than focusing on software-specific skills and technical instruction. Through practice, students will explore the relationship between static and moving images, the concept of narrative and the impact of motion on audience experience, ultimately also building a simple augmented reality (AR) experience.

During the course, you are encouraged to experiment and play with ideas, methods and representations to express your unique perspectives. You will also complete a number of short assignments to develop skills which you can apply to a personal visual narrative project developed during the course.

Course leader

Cvijeta Miljak is a designer, artist and researcher. She has been engaged in a doctoral investigation into creative participatory practices and audience engagement with exhibitions and heritage, as part of the Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality project. Through developing methods for nonintrusive participatory evaluation practices, her interests focus on exploring emerging narratives, intermedial poetics, and implications of digital tools, to re-examine the forms of storytelling in the postdigital media.

Target group

This course does not require previous experience in the topic. Some familiarity with the typical visual design software (e.g. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere or free/open-source equivalents) is encouraged.

Participants must have completed a high school or vocational degree or equivalent by the time the course starts. However, they do not have to be a degree student at a university to participate in our courses.

Additionally, all summer school course students must be 18 years or older, as it is the legal age in Finland.

Course aim

After completing the course you will be able to:

- Identify basic elements and principles of graphic design as well as the key aspects of storytelling
- Apply acquired understandings to a personal creative project
- Expand personal concepts and methods for working with visual narrative
- Experiment with creative expression and different media
- Present own work and provide constructive feedback to others
- Work collaboratively and implement good project working practices

Fee info