· Typography

As a core sophomore-level course within the Visual Communication Design program at the China Academy of Art, Typography draws on the School’s interdisciplinary strengths to deliver a structured curriculum organized around three pillars: Chinese character art and humanistic experience, multilingual typeface design, and creative typography and applied design. It systematically introduces the history of typography and foundational design principles, while foregrounding the cultural connotations of form, sound and meaning across writing systems, with particular emphasis on the unique attributes of Chinese script. Through hands-on writing practice and comparative studies of Eastern and Western typographic traditions, students develop design competencies that balance contemporary communicative efficacy with humanistic sensitivity, and cultivate independent critical thinking on the value and reinvention of typography in branding, emerging media and globalized communication contexts.

Level: Undergraduate

· Multidimensional Design & Planning

Pioneered by the China Academy of Art in 2010, this course steers students to examine social issues from a multidimensional perspective, moving beyond the conventional skill-centric aesthetic pedagogy that prioritizes technical proficiency and formal language exploration. It guides learners to identify the genuine needs of stakeholders in real-world contexts and deliver targeted visual design and planning solutions for diverse social challenges. Adopting a project-based pedagogy centered on pressing societal topics, the curriculum integrates theories from communication studies, sociology, anthropology, consumer psychology and visual psychology. Through case studies, theoretical explanation, literature review, field research and iterative design implementation, students progressively build robust multidimensional planning competencies.

Level: Undergraduate

· Content & Diagramming

Structured around the knowledge structure of content as its framework, and diagrammatic narrative and information diagramming as key operational approaches, the course ensures coherent pedagogical logic across all modules. It positions imagery as both an analytical lens and a narrative medium for sociological and anthropological inquiry, and treats diagramming as a core methodology for translating raw information into structured knowledge. Grounded in sequenced case studies and cross-temporal, cross-spatial comparative analysis, the curriculum bridges deep engagement with social structures and accessible interpretation of everyday lived experience. Students are expected to possess foundational competencies in fieldwork, archival organization, and literature review, alongside basic narrative skills in hand-drawing, drafting, and graphic design.

The course cultivates systematic thinking, logical reasoning, and genealogical framing capacities rooted in “content production and editing” and “diagrammatic deduction and induction.” Building on database frameworks for large-scale source materials, it guides students to progress from simplicity to complexity in addressing specific content via analytical diagrams, and to move from breadth to concision in framing and knowledge-structuring of massive information via principled diagrams. Anchored in a structured knowledge framework, it fosters pluralistic narrative capacities rooted in visual language and tightly aligned with content, including data graphing and information visualization. It further instills a topological awareness for dynamic diagramming: balancing universality and specificity, students learn to generate diverse variations that reflect differentiated manifestations of a single underlying principle, while retaining core coherence to synthesize complexity with concision and manage multiplicity through simplicity.

Level: Undergraduate

· Content & Planning

Building on core sophomore foundational courses including Prototype Iteration, Exhibition Design, and Spatial Narrative, this course adopts a knowledge genealogy framework and partners with government agencies, enterprises, community organizations, and cultural institutions to deliver practice-oriented, project-based teaching grounded in diverse urban-rural contexts across China. Integrating holistic planning methodologies spanning project analysis, content production, business format planning, institutional design, event curation, narrative communication, and archival documentation, it embeds diverse content with both breadth and depth into project objectives. It incorporates design and narrative—functioning as refined operational drivers across the six core design domains of graphics, text, artifacts, spatial environments, live performances, and media—into both the strategic conception and entrepreneurial incubation phases of content planning. The course ultimately equips students with both domain-specific rigor and cross-sector versatility to excel in future employment and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Level: Undergraduate

· Typology & Society

Centering on the interactive relationship between design typology and society as its core research object, the course operates along a dual research trajectory: on one hand, it examines how design typologies shape content structures and drive social evolution; on the other, it unpacks the underlying content logics and socio-dynamic forces that inform typological shifts, while mapping how human activities spanning economic, social, political and cultural domains reconfigure spatial structures. This process gives rise to a design methodology grounded in rational analysis of the socio-environmental context, elevating the micro-level design interactions between designers and commissioners into macro-level design thinking that accounts for latent contextual factors including geography, ecology, industrial dynamics, social structures, political frameworks and cultural norms. The disciplinary field and knowledge genealogy constructed through this macro-level thinking are iteratively refined via design practice itself, positioning design as the embodiment of the unity of knowledge and action—a cyclical process of moving from practice to cognition and back to practice.

Level: Postgraduate