What is Visual Design

The main goal of the design process is to learn how to ideate: generate ideas and translate them into visual designs. In the first class we brainstormed ideas for poster. We talked about color connotations and type faces and how certain fonts and colors can convey meaning and trigger emotions.

Illustration: character creating is one of the foundations design skills. Students saw examples of different illustration techniques. They were tasked to come up with two characters: one is “ugly doll prototype” and another one is any other character they want to tell a story about. The ugly doll creation has goal to let young designers free up from any insecurities and not to think in a paradigm of “cute”.

By Avitel (8 years old)

Next step is to make our characters live, by putting them in action. Since storytelling considered most successful mean of communication comics is a great example of communication. Comics exhibit visual and verbal way to tell a story. Students got familiar with comic creation principles and tips and sketched a few ideas. When we went deeper into individual comic strips, I encouraged young designers to incorporate their classmates’ characters, to encourage collaboration.

One of the principal values of design thinking is collaborative ideation. We all benefit from sharing ideas and getting feedback from other creative thinkers. One of the rules that is good to follow: everyone has something unique to share, therefore active listening will benefit each creative mind.

After creating narrative with speech bubbles and characters we switched to branding. Logo or icons is great way to work on expressing idea with minimal means. Stripping down decorative parts forces to focus on core elements like shape and line.

Materials used: ink pen, watercolor with stencil cut from clear film. Sammy, 12 years old

Materials used: ink pen, water color, color pencils. Emma, 9 years old

I created pdfs with scans of work to demonstrate children that their work is meaningful and can be scaled up and down. I added sketches with some of the concept to show that brainstorm and ideation are essential part of any design process.