Teaching Elements and Principles of Design through One Minute Animation to Fundamental Design Students

Elements and Principles of Design are taught to undergraduate design students at the fundamental level. These design theories are the basis of foundation studies whereby they are introduced to design elements and principles before they are further taught design development methods and others. The students are from Fundamental Level or known as Alpha Foundation students from the Faculty of Creative Multimedia in Multimedia University. These very basic theories have been practiced around the world and usually taught in design departments including art and design, fine arts, graphic design, architecture and more recently to cater to multimedia students, which is a current domain that integrates art and design with multimedia applications. This paper aims to study on how the elements and principles of design can be taught through usage of multimedia applications such as the one minute animation video of motion graphics. This new introduction to digital attributes is an additional to the current syllabus which consists of mostly analogue exercises and outputs such as art works of painting and drawing. Principles of multimedia are introduced and the integration of digital method serves as an introduction to multimedia course in degree which the students will take upon completion of the foundation studies. By studying the current syllabus and enhancing with one design class of multimedia project in the third semester of their foundation year, a number of one hundred and forty one students were given the design project of one minute multimedia video. Assessment on their work is done based on the background research, process of design development and the final video. Some screen shots from students' works are presented and analysed. Findings from the study will benefit research of related areas in teaching and learning of art and design. A discussion is made on whether the objective of teaching basic theories using multimedia can be achieved and whether the students understand the subject can be derived from the video outputs that they have done.