After hours: NAFA Visual Communication course

I’ve been doing all sort of design and drawing for quite a while now. For fun, privately but also for my projects at work. Web design, DTP etc…

Everything I did, I learned with trial and error and own experimentation, without doing any proper courses or studying design at a university. Recently, however, I thought it would be a good idea to get some theoretical background to boost whatever practical design skills I got throughout working on my projects.

So … I signed up for a part-time course on Visual Communication at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. It’s a rather old and renowned public education institution in Singapore. The course has an interesting curriculum and allows to have a day job + attend classes in the evenings. There are 4 parts to it:

• Visual Communication 1 – Principle of Design (10 sessions x 3 hours)
• Visual Communication 2 – Digital Design I (10 sessions x 3 hours)
• Visual Communication 3 – Typography & Colour Study (10 sessions x 3 hours)
• Visual Communication 4 – Digital Design II (10 sessions x 3 hours)

Parts 1 and 2 go concurrently for about 2 months and afterwards parts 3 and 4 for another 2 months.

The academy gives rather little information on what the courses contain, so in the reminder of this post I’ll explain it from the participant point of view and in another post I’ll update with my review on the entire course once I’m done with it.

“Visual Communication 1” main theme is logo/business card design and teacher passing some of his professional experience with addition of little theory (backed by some minimalist slides).

“Visual Communication 2” is basically an Illustrator tutorial going through some most typical functions (and exploring them from different angles) and concluding with work on a packaging design project.

Each week those two run concurrently but are not directly related (ie what you hear in class on principles of design is not practiced later in Illustrator class), however in totality of things logo design is done in Illustrator, so the lab class somehow supplements the logo assignment.