12 Graphic Design 3RD Year Packaging with Jamie Calf: Our third years were taught by department alumna and graphic designer, Jamie Calf. She is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Johannesburg, with a fondness for tea, cats, and her plant collection. Jamie is an alumna of the University of Johannesburg, where she studied Communication/Graphic Design. She is known by her students as a “fantastic lecturer who truly cares for her work”. For this project, students were tasked to create packaging as part of their coursework, but it also served as an entry for the annual packaging design competition known as the Gold Pack Awards. 3RD Year Self-Branding and Work-Based Learning with Telita Esterhuizen: Department alumna and freelance illustrator and designer, Telita Esterhuizen, taught self-branding to our third years this year. This unit requires students to professionally brand themselves as designers, ensuring that they are able to enter industry with their own portfolio websites, business cards, CVs and other self-promotional material. The work-based learning unit seeks to teach students professional skills, prepare them for the working environment through internships, and having speakers who work in the various corners of industry speak to the students. 3RD Year Zine Project: The third-year zine unit was a collaboration between the students and the zine duo Pangazine (formerly Idiozine). Lecturer Neil Badenhorst, who taught this unit, collaborated with marketing expert, Frederika Fourie, and multimedia designer, Tana Pistorius (who make up Panagzine), and set up a brief where students were required to develop their own concepts and create a 12-page zine in which they seek to spark conversations regarding various projects. As the majority of third-year practical units are set up for commercial viability, ensuring students demonstrate the skills that they will need in industry, the zine unit is an opportunity for students to do research and craft designs about social topics that they themselves are passionate about. The unit promotes design history, the integration of what is learned in theory modules into practice. The students’ topics ranged from issues relating to gender-based violence, queer identities and experience, grappling with identity, the war on Palestine, cultural hybridity and more. Ten of the students’ zines were exhibited at the Jack Ginsberg Book Arts Centre this year in an exhibition curated by Prof David Paton from Visual Arts. There was also a panel discussion between Prof Paton, UJ, Open Window and Wits. Neil Badenhorst and students, Musa Malobola and Ditshegofatso Maoto, were part of the panel. Pangazine Issue 1, which will consist as a publication consisting of student work will be launched later this year. COLLABORATION Honours Participation Design: In this particularly ambitious unit, coordinated by H0D Christa van Zyl, students are presented with briefs from real-life clients to which they need to respond with a real, feasible design execution. This unit prioritises human-centred, communitybased graphic design. This year, both our students and the Industrial Design honours students participated within this project. Our stakeholders and partners for this project include Girls and Boys Town, Jozi My Jozi, Crystal Springs Mountain Lodge, Water for the Future, Joburg Zoo, and African Reclaimers Organisation.
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