Makerversity x Princes Trust – Spring 2022

Get Started in Graphic Design: Sustainability

We have partnered with the Princes Trust since 2014 delivering week long workshops for 18-25 year olds who aren’t in work or education and have an interest in design and making. Our members deliver the workshops and offer follow on work experience opportunities for the young people.

This Spring we delivered our latest workshops, Get Started in Graphic Design, with a focus on sustainability. Read on to learn more about the project and the outcomes.

The Brief:

When you meet someone new, you’re likely to develop an impression of them. Then, you interact with that person, and your impression of them further deepens. In a sense, you develop an idea of their personality. Admittedly, all your future interactions with this person will depend on this impression and personality assessment that you did.The visual identity and graphics are much the same; they reflect a brand’s personality and values and communicate those to its audience.

While 2020 and 2021 might have been two years we’d all like to forget, visual designers are at the forefront of ensuring that 2022 will be a memorable era for good reasons this time. Design is so often the looking glass through which we engage with the world around us, and in our increasingly engaged world, the way things are presented online, in print, and in our daily lives has never been more important or revealing. As Radim Malinic of Brand Nu – one of London’s leading brand and visual identity design agencies – puts it: “We want to make people feel something and feel something excellent. On the back of the ground-shaking, Covid-flavoured year, I feel we’ll be making more decisions on how to do work that communicates elements of surprise, compassion and connection with our audiences.”

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The programme’s main goal was to emphasise how sustainability is also affecting the field of graphics – a type of design that usually gets left out when discussing it. Being a sustainability-conscious designer and being able to fully express what sustainability means to you personally has become a primary requirement in the industry. Graphics and other designers are not just being hired based on their technical skills, as the industry acknowledges that soft skills and critical thinking play an equally important role.

The Princes Trust young people were tasked with developing a sustainability concept, e.g. what sustainability means specifically to them and coming up with speculative products, services or campaigns that best portray it. They came up with very varied and creative responses: cycling over driving campaign, an initiative promoting mending clothing and re-wear, a hotline where you can inquire about the sustainability of your items and a VR tool detecting garment composition, to name a few.

The deliverables created a visual language for their idea and expressed it in a placard format. They learned about the meaning and association of shapes, colours, typography, and placement – and gained technical skills to produce their ideas (design in vector software and preparing files for vinyl cutting).

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Big thanks to The Princes Trust, all our members that took part, and Tina Gorjanc for delivering the programme on behalf of Makerversity.