By Priscilla Ho Yuxin
Students of Han Chiang University College of Communication (HCUC) emerged as the winners in a designing competition enunciating the theme of loving and protecting endangered species.
Three students of School of Applied Creative Arts and Design (SACAD) were amongst the six winners in the Endangered Species Design Competition organised by Relax Bottle Sdn Bhd. Each of the winners received a cash prize amounting to RM800.
Khaw Guat Ling, a Year 1 Semester 2 student studying Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Creative Multimedia, could not hide her surprise when the winners were announced as she always felt designing was not her strong forte.
Nevertheless, she was keen to test the waters and decided to participate by designing a juvenile tapir as one of the endangered species. Instead of jumping straight into the work, she patiently began with preliminary research about nature and characteristics of her preferred animal. She found interesting information to be incorporated into the design she had planned to produce.
“Tapirs are herbivorous animals and some juvenile tapirs are still with dappled markings. Inspired by these two concepts, I wanted to project them as the dominant element in my designing work,” Khaw explained excitedly.
Khaw added that she aimed to create an image of a tapir grazing grass. Therefore, she drew leaves stretching from the tapir’s mouth to its body as a symbolic representation of the body tripe.
Another winner, Tiu Cheng Hong from the same programme expressed a similar thought process in his designing work before deciding to feature a sun bear.
Tiu designed a ‘thinking bubble’ emerging from the bear, illustrating the thoughts of the sun bear whereas the leaves represented the wilderness of its habitat. This poster, according to Tiu, delivers a message to adore and love these cute bears.
Celine Chin Jin Feng, a Year 2 Semester 1 student from Diploma in Visual Arts and Design shared that she took part in this competition under the encouragement of her lecturer, Low Saw San who had advised her to test her skills in designing. Abiding to her advice, Celine constructed a work plan.
“My design concept is simple; the message that I want to deliver is to save the pangolin. I found that pangolins are one of the most trafficked animals on the planet,” Celine added.
Celine’s biggest challenge was however the colour combination of the design as the organisers had limited it to two colours per design. Finally, she chose orange and white as the theme colours. The decision is deemed fruitful as it helped her to win the competition.
Commenting on their achievements, Lim Thong Soon, the Dean of SACAD expressed his happiness and commended their teamwork.
“Students should join more competitions while exploring more art and design activities. It is not only about winning a prize but this victory is important for their portfolio development during their studies. This will help them to establish better credentials which could help in securing career opportunities,” Lim expressed.
All the winners hope to continue to nurture their interest in art and design that could be meaningful to the society as well as to themselves.
Leave a Reply