About

This year’s CSM Graphic Communication Design Showcase identity was designed to highlight the individuality of the programme’s graduating practitioners by focusing on typographic elements familiar to all while presenting them in all their beautiful, quirky, thick and thin forms, drawing from the college’s archive of fonts!

And while undergraduate students come out of their BA with a bang (!), post-graduate students annotate (*) and expand their practice through MA GCD. 

Ultimately we wanted it to be simple, bold, captivating — saying a lot without having to say much.

Glyphs (most popular amongst them being punctuation marks like commas, full stops etc.) mean a lot to both graphic designers and non-graphic designers because of their ability to quickly add emotion and meaning to a text or graphic image.

Historically designed by typographers (the original graphic designers), they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, saying the same thing in a different voice. Though given the uniformity of readily available media today, glyphs most often than not look default like this (!) or this (*). In a similar way, graphic design as a field is oftentimes bunched under a very simplistic view of what graphic design is. We wanted to subvert this, and show through the diversity of just two glyphs how practices can vary, in the same way fonts — a fraction of what graphic design is — do.

Of course, this is Central Saint Martins, so we are blessed with access to an immense collection of fonts and typographic resources which were invaluable in the development of the project.

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