Until the gatekeeper comes!
What do you actually do in the “Communication Design” course? And what does HTW Berlin have to do with communication design, they only have technical and economic courses? The HTW students were repeatedly confronted with these questions. Which is why in 2012, four students started a community blog as part of a future workshop. The team has now grown to six students from all disciplines and together they fill their blog: Until the gatekeeper comes!
As a communication design student you do projects, on average two per semester; you create books, typography, apps, animations, web designs and so on. Especially shortly before hand-in, sometimes late into the evening, until the gatekeeper asks you to please leave the university for the day. And so the gatekeeper is somehow always part of the projects and was therefore quickly chosen as the blog's namesake!
The blog shows projects not only from the six blog operators, but from all possible students in the course. Christian (29), David (23), Maike (22), Peter (26), Sebastian (29) and Vivien (24) mainly take care of finding the projects, asking fellow students what they are currently working on and whether they would prepare the project for the blog after completion. But it doesn't always have to be a project as part of your studies; sometimes private work from the blog owners or their fellow students is also shown. As a team, the six then decide whether the respective project is suitable for the blog. “There are always projects where we don’t agree with each other as to whether they are good projects. As a rule, the number of clicks on these projects explodes. Sometimes you don't always have an idea of what will be well received. And through the blog you get a bit of an insight into it,” explains Sebastian. Getting a feeling for what the viewers of the products like is, so to speak, a free learning experience that the blog operators take away along the way.
In their self-image, communication design involves communicating things to the outside world, showing what you do and gaining experience in the process. After all, pretty much everything is communication. That's why the Pförtner team members all blog privately, of course always with high quality standards. They will definitely benefit from their studies.
Some of the Pförtner team members have previously completed training in the design field. Vivien, for example, is a trained media designer and still decided to study last year: “Studying is always good because it broadens your horizons. You get to know things that you didn't even know existed before. If you have the opportunity to study, you should definitely do it. I always wanted to do animated cartoons, but I get to know so many other exciting things here that I can now imagine a lot of things.”
Andreas Ingerl (40) is a lecturer at the HTW and looks after the blog, is the contact person for the six and has a general right of veto, which he only rarely uses; the students usually organize everything themselves. And apparently it's a good thing too, because the response they get is consistently positive; In addition to several thousand followers, the gatekeeper is also featured on Tumblr in the design category. Above all, the blog operators and all readers see what is being done in other courses and by other lecturers. This can quickly create starting points for new projects and ideas. And they are slowly approaching their original goal of changing the HTW's reputation as a purely technical and business school and showing that there is also creativity there.
You would also like to become blogger of the month or know someone who should be. Then simply write a short message to rademacher@uniglobale.de
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Until the gatekeeper comes! What do you actually do in the “Communication Design” course? And what does HTW Berlin have to do with communication design, they only have technical and economic courses? The HTW students were repeatedly confronted with these questions. Which is why in 2012, four students started a community blog as part of a future workshop. In the meantime
