Class Design Language

The Design Language course unit provides an exploratory field for identifying, interpreting and creating different communication languages as a laboratory for experimentation. Through the observation, understanding and explanation of processes from other creative fields, such as cinema and photography, principles are explored that can be abstracted, appropriated and transferred to communication design. Experimentation is a fundamental component of this process, allowing different elements to be brought together, related, reorganised and reinterpreted, and revealing how these relationships produce new possibilities of meaning. Image/image, image/text and text/text relationships are explored in the construction of communication narratives, including photographic narratives, subsequently developed and edited across different digital and printed media.

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Image/image, image/text and text/text relationships are explored in the construction of languages, narratives and meanings. 1. Parallax and Sudden Transition in Understanding Parallax broadens points of view through different relationships between the same elements. Sudden Transition shows how changes in these relationships can significantly transform understanding and meaning. 2. Mystery and Abstraction Mystery begins with what is not understood and builds relationships that make it explainable, until it ceases to be mysterious. Abstraction identifies patterns and structures that go beyond particular cases, allowing them to be transferred to new languages and narratives. 3. Retroactive Reconfiguration of Understanding and Validation Retroactive Reconfiguration shows how new relationships modify previous understanding. Validation results from the accumulation of knowledge, enabling more complete exercises, more complex relationships and the integration of acquired knowledge.

The methodology is developed through an Experimental Laboratory, where students construct and transform image/image, image/text and text/text relationships through progressive exercises. The same elements remain available for different approaches, combinations, sequences and reorganisations, making it possible to observe how each decision can alter understanding and meaning. The different phases progressively introduce new ways of observing, relating, explaining and abstracting, accumulating knowledge that is recovered in subsequent exercises. Experimentation develops through the construction of communication and photographic narratives, involving processes of selection, organisation and editing. The results are materialised in digital and printed media, allowing different ways of structuring and communicating the constructed narratives to be explored..

GRILO, João Mário - As lições do cinema: Manual de filmologia. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2007. ISBN 978-972-772-705-6. RITCHIN, Fred - Dopo la fotografia. Trad. Chiara Veltri. Torino: Einaudi, 2012. ISBN 978-88-06-21194-3. KNAUER, Roland - Transformation: Basic Principles and Methodology of Design. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7643-6761-9. TARDE, Gabriel - As Leis da Imitação. 1.ª ed. Brasil: António Fontoura, 2025. ISBN 978-65-01-74297-7.