Visual Communication: The Campaign

Ten designers. One studio. One campaign.

About This Course

This course runs as one studio, not ten separate projects. There is a client, a brief, a budget, and a deadline. Everyone develops their own directions. One is chosen. Then all ten of you build the campaign from it, each authoring your own pieces, all of it holding together as a single solution. Assembly runs as a studio with departments. This course is the design department. Printmaking and Photography are the others, running their own courses this term. When the campaign needs artwork this department cannot make, you go and find it in the work they have already made. The client is Assembly. The job is launching PLAYGRND, our adult courses. Nobody knows they exist yet. The campaign this studio produces is the campaign that goes up.

What You'll Create

A complete campaign to launch PLAYGRND: posters, social, and a web page.
A written visual system the whole studio worked to.
A costed print schedule.
Each piece credited by name to the student who authored it.
Every sourced asset credited to the student who made it and the course it came from.

Course Details

Age Range: 15-18
Term: Term 2
Schedule: Thursdays, 6:00pm
Duration: 10 weeks
Price: $500
Spots Available: 10 of 10

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What You'll Learn

• You'll take a real brief from a real client and learn to question it before you answer it.
• You'll research an audience instead of assuming one.
• You'll present a direction, defend it, and watch it lose.
• You'll write a visual system that nine other designers have to work to.
• You'll go into other departments and find use in work that was never made for you.
• You'll hold one idea together across ten hands, three formats and a fixed budget.
• You'll deliver to a deadline that does not move.

The Support You'll Get

You won't be handed the answer. You'll be shown how to find it.

Your practitioner has spent years making their own work, and their own mistakes. In the studio they work alongside you: asking the right questions, pointing out options you hadn't seen, helping you push through the moment you get stuck. The ideas stay yours. The decisions stay yours. They're there so you're never finding the way through alone.

Week by Week

Week 1: How a studio actually works. Client, brief, budget, deadline.

Week 2: Reading the brief. Finding the real problem underneath the wish list.

Week 3: Research. Understanding an audience that isn't you.

Week 4: Directions presented. The studio picks one. Everyone builds it.

Week 5: Hizo. Selecting work from the printmaking and photography courses.

Week 6: Hizo. Building the campaign around what you found.

Week 7: Production. Posters, social, web, each authored, all one system.

Week 8: Critique and consistency. The budget forces something out.

Week 9: Delivery. Final files handed over, print run committed.

Week 10: Exhibition. Public showing, families attend.

Hizo

Hizo is Assembly's collaboration week.

Named after the song Four Hands by artist Hizou. Two people, four hands, one thing made. Hizo is Japanese: something valued and kept close.

Assembly runs as one studio. A Hizo week is where courses meet: work moves between disciplines and across age groups, and something gets made that neither room could have made alone.

Every course ends with an exhibition

Celebrate what you created with the people and our community. Every term concludes with a presentation or exhibition of your work: a chance to share your process, your ideas, and what you've made.

Your Instructor

Andrew Chew

Visual Communication & Photography

Andrew studied Visual Communication, majoring in Photography. Twenty years on, he's worked as a designer, photographer and gallery director, running No Vacancy Gallery and later directing YAVA. He built Assembly because the system around young people kept treating creativity as decoration instead of discipline. He teaches the way he's worked: try, fail, try again. Back your ideas. Test them. Push through when it's not working yet. He's spent years making his own work and his own mistakes, and in the studio he works alongside you, showing you how to look, how to frame, how to decide what matters, then make it.