Graphic Design & Textile Workshop

In their second year, students are asked to undertake group work on an intensive, short-term project focusing on a particular topic. Last week, second-year students, third-year students admitted via an alternative entry pathway and engineering students from ESTP taking elective classes were invited to work on some graphic design and textile concepts.

The topic

Maps are extremely useful throughout the various stages of a trip in preparing, envisioning and navigating, not to mention as a memory aid once the trip is over.

The topic in question was ‘Comprehending a trip with a creative map’.

Supervised by artist and textile designer Nisrine Harakat, illustrator and textile designer Virginie Gaubert and the school’s academic advisor and graphic designer Karima Bidar, ten groups of students worked on graphic/textile interpretations of abstract maps by reinventing their daily routes, producing a new experience of the city.

Four days and five key stages for this project

First of all, with their eyes closed, they drew their daily home-school journey on a piece of A3 paper.

Then, they zoomed in and focused on any architectural, natural or urban landscape components and symbols to derive graphical records of fragments from their journeys.

A third stage invited them to carry out investigations into reinventing symbols to indicate how to travel on this circuit and which might translate verbs like ‘walk’, ‘stroll’, ‘run’, ‘skip’, etc.

For the fourth stage of the project, they selected the most powerful and significant components from the preceding stages to create a graphically powerful and sensitive journey.

So, what about textiles? This was the central element of the fifth stage, as they experimented with techniques and textile materials that would best express and enhance their routes.

Multiple purposes

More than a simple graphical exercise, this workshop helped students reinvent design codes, learn to translate actions using more abstract representations, compose with meaning and sensitivity, and of course work with textiles, which seems to have been a completely new experience for quite a few of them!

Images summarising these four days of group work, in the video below: