Top Designs 2024 is proudly presented as part of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s VCE Season of Excellence, an annual showcase celebrating creative and innovative work from Victorian secondary schools, which also includes Top Acts, Top Arts, Top Class, Top Screen and Top Talks.

Thank you to our VCE teachers for organising and taking our students on these excursions to further enrich their learning in Visual Arts.

VCE Visual Communication Design

On Friday 10 May, we embarked on our journey to the Top Design exhibition. After a short coffee break, we began our walk to the Melbourne Museum where the exhibition was held. Once inside, we were blessed with the displays of many different Visual Communication Designs that reflected each design field, as well as addressing real life, human centered problems.

Each display had a short explanation of the design taken from their design briefs and allowed us to have an insight into their design solutions. One of the exhibitions that stood out to me personally was the ‘Fruits for Fauna’ café/educational hub. It used innovative ‘environments’ and ‘messages’ design with many bright colours, smooth edges and the use of many plants and greenery around the outside of the hub.

In terms of ‘environments’, the display consisted of a 3D model/ mock-up of the final design, floor plans and elevations of the hub and a site plan. The ‘messages’ part included a custom, handmade alphabet, a menu of the cafe’s foods and many different logo possibilities that had contrasting colours and exhaustive patterns and designs. It showed interesting contexts, alternative logos, typefaces, a colour pallete and description of the concept. This reflected a real human centered design problem and created a communal space that was inclusive and innovative.

Another inspiring display included a garden and plant label design. This showed a proposed plant sign design that was used as a map as a starting point to navigate people through the garden. It also included a floor plan and elevations as well as QR code to access a bird’s eye view, a shaded section, a platform and ground level site plan. There was also a 3D model/ mock-up of the final designs.

There were many other amazing designs displayed this year at Top Design that consisted of 2 to 4 or more different presentation formats that helped to explain and display their human centered design concepts. Each design considered ethical thinking and the use of plants and greens to promote the coexistence of nature and humans.

Overall, the exhibition was an entirely inspiring source, not only for me, but everyone studying Units 1&2 or 3&4 VCD. The extensive exploration of design possibilities and research successfully puts Unit 4 into perspective for all of us in Year 12 VCD and has made us all reconsider our designs to ensure that our concepts can be explored like the ones we sat at Top Designs. After talking to our lovely teacher Mrs Radford about the possibilities of our designs we all feel confident in making our Unit 4 designs as thorough, unique and innovative as possible.

Summer Magri
Year 12

Year 12 Media Excursion

On 30 April, the Year 12 Media class went to the Top Screens exhibition at the Australian Centre of Moving Images (ACMI) at Federation Square. We saw all the amazing short films, documentaries and animations that received some of the highest marks in Victoria for last year’s Year 12 students. This gave us inspiration about this year’s media production, showing us different camera techniques, lighting, set design and other pieces of information.

As part of our research task for our folio, our class also went to the NGV to see all of the different and wonderful works of art such as paintings, sculptures and other products by Picasso and Monet to help to inspire our future work. Overall, the day was wonderful, giving us inspiration and creativity for our future works.

Lucy Curry
Year 12

Year 11 Media Excursion

On Tuesday 7 May, the VCE Unit 1&2 Media Class embarked on a trip to the city for the day. To begin the day, we met the teachers at Federation Square and were then able to wander around the area to photograph the surrounding sites and practise using our cameras. We were taken on a tour around the Australian section of the NGV, where we were lucky enough to see some incredible artworks and exhibitions that inspired our creativity and gave us some great opportunities for taking photos. After that, we had the rest of the day to wander around the city in small groups to take any photos we would need for our magazine project. This allowed us to foster our areas of interest for our magazines and hone in on our personal photography styles. Overall, we all had an amazing day and were very grateful for the opportunity to photograph and explore the city.

Grace Robins and Taylah Bell
Year 11