Graphic Research Group | Identity Design

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The Graphic Research Group (GRG) is a faculty alliance interested in advancing research and practice in communication design at Emily Carr. The group presently includes Katherine Gillieson, Jon Hannan, Chris Hethrington who runs the Motion Unit, Celeste Martin, and Cameron Neat

Graphic Research Group works to provide a platform for faculty, students and others working in Communication Design at Emily Carr to indulge themselves in activities and workshops and share their work through various platforms while build a community of practice.

Task:

The task as the Research Assistant was to create an identity system to identify and promote Communication Design discipline at Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver to the outside world while hosting events, talks, exhibitions, screenings, critiques, workshops and seminars.

Logo Concept:

The logo form of GRG has been inspired from researching into the history of symbols and characters, giving rise to bizarre forms and shapes — ‘dingbats’ (derived from ancient printing heritage). These are commonly found in most of the computing systems but often ignored due to its legibility. These non-textual stylised symbols were created to be used as a unique tool for the pre-internet era. It was akin to emojis, but with more utility.

Emojis are like dingbats in being typographical symbols. "But they also hark back to the ancient concept of picture writing from which pictographic-ideographic-logographic Chinese characters and kanji evolved.” - Charles Bigelow

The dingbats used are the symbolic representation of the abbreviation 'GRG'.