YDA 1:2019 South San Francisco — Week 2

Week 2 with YDA1 South SF was paired with bright sunny skies and creativity! This week, we opened up with a fun icebreaker, throwing around a beach ball with fun questions to get to know each other better. From Who’s Your Favorite Artist to What’s Your Spirit Animal (unicorn!), we got to shake off any shyness and see personalities begin to blossom.

We continued our morning with a seminar on communication design. Communication design, we defined is “… is to communicate clearly, by whatever means you can control or master.” We had an informative presentation on communication design with motion graphics, posters, a “name that logo” game, and how design helps millions of people every day. It was heartwarming to see students faces light up when hearing about how thoughtful communication design can benefit our lives every day, from easy to navigate transportation centers to advertisements with a hopeful message. The class was engaged and ready to learn!

The lesson was put into play when students designed their own posters. In our first exercise, students redesigned one of three famous posters. This allowed them to pinpoint what the poster was trying to communicate, and recreate it. In our next exercise, students were asked to design a poster to bring the message of bringing better lunches to school, a topic they seemed very passionate about. From “If we have better food, then students will be excited to come to school” and “If we had a variety of healthy food, we’d feel happier” — the students were able to draft, sketch, and communicate in various groups to create their own posters. It was amazing to see design principles we talked about such as typography, fonts, color, and composition come into play as they designed something they wanted to communicate.

Overall, engagement and excitement increased greatly this past week, and it was amazing to see creativity, personalities, and collaboration begin to grow and blossom. Until next week!