Name: Rahul Kumar Dhanuk

Guide: Prof. Raja Mohanty

Course: Visual Communication

Visual Communication at IDC, An Analysis

It was an opportunity for me to learn and understand Visual Communication in a deeper sense and I hope it would also enable me to better understand the larger subject of Design. I tried to gain an understanding of Visual Communication (VC) through a qualitative and quantitative analysis  of  all  VC  projects  done  at  IDC  since  its  inception.  These analyses are compiled in a book. Thus the project also helped me learn about book designing process.

For a qualitative analysis I choose key aspects of each project abstracts and highlight them. Reflecting on these statements would possibly be a good way to develop a sense of what Visual Communication at IDC, was all about. The pages contain extracts from selected Visual Communication projects at IDC. The chosen words represent ideas and aspirations, the fundamental elements that maintain the project’s spirit. The highlighted words can be seen as a road map to the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of the projects, sometimes something abstract, which is determining its character.

I scanned through all the projects done in Visual Communication at IDC from 1985 to 2016 to get a sense of how VC has evolved over the years. For that I created the following categories to divide all the projects :

Books / Print / Illustration- (including Photo documentation, Visual aids)
Film / Theatre / Animation
Exhibition
Signage
Typography
Graphic Design- (including Packaging, Iconography, Informative, diagrams and Designs)
Digital- (including Websites / applications/ Multimedia)
Interactive- (including Computer aided Learnings / Devices for shopping, elderly etc)
3D/Installation- (including model making for airports, Designing of Museum, Control systems for Polyhouse plantation, Sculptures)
Game- (including Visualising exercise for Mathematics, Design awareness aid, Learning devices)

I decided to create three time based divisions of entire IDC history i.e. (1985-1995), (1996-2006), (2007-2016) and then categorise projects according to the categories I mentioned above.

To know about design I read many papers, written by Mr. MP Ranjan. He was an independent academic, and author of the blog “ Design for India”. Then I have watched a short video named “ The Story of Stuff “. The book “ The Great Indian Middle Class” by Pavan K Verma helped me in understanding the history of contemporary Indian society. After all those reading I have tried to portray my main understandings of Design through a creative way