Made for China: global collaboration and understanding in advertising design

With a burgeoning economy and one of the world’s largest populations of consumers, the growth and opportunities for graphic design in Mainland China seem endless. Western design and advertising agencies are eager to capture the imaginations of the Mainland audience. The visual communications strategies proposed by western advertising agencies however, often display an inadequate understanding of the historical relevance of symbols and long held value sets of the Chinese consumer. Some agencies take the viewpoint that the Mainland audience wants a copy of things ‘western.’ This can be observed in the shopping districts of most major cities in China where billboards displaying oversized images of Caucasian models dominate the visual environment. Another commonly used strategy is to use a mix of visually interesting Chinese symbols without understanding the full meaning and implication of those symbols. The above illustrates that design educators must begin the process of cross-cultural awareness at the undergraduate level to assure that more effective creative strategies can be achieved in the future. This paper explores cultural confusion in design and the possibilities of overcoming these misunderstandings through cross-cultural collaboration.

Visions of Utopia

Since 1949, propaganda posters have been produced in China as a visual language to unite the masses. Posters and billboards portraying images of youth in minority costumes, traditional paper cuts and China’s abundant workforce engaged in modernisation were meant to unite the masses through ‘revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism’. These images offer interesting insight into Mao’s version ‘socialist utopia’. With the opening of China to foreign investment and trade in 1979, the vision of a ‘socialist utopia’ has changed once again. Propaganda posters are replaced with large-scale billboards featuring luxury cars, clothing and products from the West. In order to illustrate this change, artists from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, Lisa Scharoun (Lecturer of Graphic Design) and Frances Tatarovic (Lecturer of Photography), have created a series of ‘advertisements’ that utilize similar themes of Maoist era propaganda posters with the infusion of the glossy characteristics of luxury fashion advertising. The images reference techniques and the visual language of contemporary western commercial fashion photography. Within the artworks, the past and present visual culture of China is juxtaposed to create a dialogue between the icons of the Maoist vision of a socialist utopia and the contemporary visual icons of fashion and luxury advertising.

Beg op co-op : beggars opera co-operative

Website design. Development and identity roll out for the Beggars Opera Co-Operative

Fourpoint

4pt is a publication by four designers and academics from Monash University, Faculty of Art & Design who have come together with a shared desire to critically analyse, question and debate issues facing the currency of graphic design through text, image and the medium of poster. This is the first issue of 4pt, a selection of 4 posters and essays united under the theme of Reverie by Gene Bawden, Brad Haylock, Sarah Jones and Russell Kennedy

Lynsey Martin: A case study in 1970s Australian experimental animation

Lynsey Martin’s short experimental Animations remain largely unknown internationally. His graphic 16mm films Approximately Water (4 minutes 1972), Whitewash (1973, 4 minutes), Interview (25 minutes 1973) and Leading Ladies (1975 5 minutes) are analysed for their technique and cultural position, artifacts of a productive if marginalized period of artist made films. These graphic films stand as critical works at the heart experimental filmmaking in Australia and speak through their design and production method to current trends in digital media. Martin’s work includes the use of collage and its erasure, the grain of the photographic image and handpainting and drawing imagery directly on the film surface. Martin deals with the graphic and material elements of the filmstrip, the nature of filmic movement and the nature of photography in public space. For martin his films deal with films deal abstraction and illusionism, elements of chance, the deconstruction of film language, the diary film and process as content. These films stand as historic aesthetic traces of an immediate hands-on approach to image making that came into crisis in Australia through the disappearance of technical education in the 1980s when Martin taught graphic design in technical schools.

A to Z safari

An alphabet app designed by Deakin University researchers specialising in literacy education, IT and graphic design to support children beginning to learn letter-sound relationships using research into memory retention. Tested with Australian primary school students, the ‘form-taking’ images used in this app have been found to be more effective at assisting children to learn common letter-sound relationships than images that are not form-taking (e.g. integrated images). A to Z Safari offers engaging mini-games to explore and reinforce letter-sound relationships, along with a password-protected admin/data area where students’ progress and gameplay statistics are recorded – data which can be emailed directly to the teacher. A to Z Safari has not been designed to replace classroom activities, but was designed as an electronic application to complement them. An A3-sized alphabet chart accompanies the app in the teacher area so that teachers can print the charts out to place on their students’ tables for their reference outside of game play.

Continuous improvement through shared understanding : reconceptualising instructional design for online learning

Many Australian tertiary institutions provide support for academic staff in the design and development of online teaching and learning resources, often employing a centralised unit staffed with educational and instructional designers, multimedia and online developers, audio/video producers and graphic artists. It is not unusual for these units to have evolved from print-based distance education providers and consequently the design and development processes inherent within those units are often steeped in ‘traditional’ sequential instructional development models. We argue that these models are no longer valid for effectively working with academic staff given the dynamic nature of online learning environments and the diversity of skills to implement effective online learning. This paper therefore presents an extended instructional design model in which the development cycle for online teaching and learning materials uses a scaffolding strategy in order to cater for learner-centred activities and to maximise scarce developer and academic resources. The model also integrates accepted phases of the instructional development process to provide guidelines for the disposition of staff and to more accurately reflect the creation of resources as learning design rather than instructional design. It is a model that builds on instructional design processes and integrates concepts of team-based development, shared understanding and the development of relevant communities of practice.

Creative suburbs? How women, design and technology renew Australian suburbs

Australian suburbs have long been subjected to negative stereotyping – as aesthetic wastelands, politically conservative, socially isolated and environmentally rapacious – as the last places you would expect creativity. A critical engagement with this discourse and an examination of older as well as some newer suburbs unsettles these characterizations. A broad definition of ‘creativity’ directs attention to what was occurring in 20th century Australian suburbs – with a creative domestic economy and modernist architecture providing strong counters to their negative portrayal. Further, as a sample of Melbourne’s contemporary master-planned estates will illustrate, at least some of this city’s houses and neighbourhoods are at the leading edge of architectural innovation, community building and environmental sustainability – creatively developing alternatives to the stereotypical suburb.