Sustainability has become a defining imperative for brands and consumers in an era of intensifying environmental and social challenges. Organisations increasingly turn to visual storytelling as a strategic communication tool to foster environmental consciousness, drive behavioural change, and shape public perception. This paper investigates the role of visual storytelling in advancing sustainable advertising practices. It explores how such techniques can be integrated into design education to prepare emerging creatives for purpose-driven communication. Grounded in a dual focus on environmental and social responsibility, this study responds to two central questions: (1) How can visual storytelling techniques influence consumer engagement and action toward sustainability?

Using the second phase of a two-year-long project called the Drum Magazine Project as a case study, this paper responds to how we can address cultural pride and preservation of uniqueness in a globalised world. Drawing inspiration from the landmark South African magazine, the project embarked on a process of teaching South African fashion history through archives from this magazine. Building on the first phase’s focus on the 1950s and 1960s, the second phase included students working with theories of translocality (Hughes 2022) and the ‘Afro’ fashion look (Ford 2015) to study 1970s fashion in Johannesburg as an expression of translocal subjectivities.

Lived experiences are central to preserving Indigenous cultural heritage, shaping identity, and enabling knowledge transmission. Globalisation creates major challenges for Indigenous communities by pressuring them to conform to dominant cultures, leading to the loss of traditions and practices. For the ≠Khomani San of Witdraai, Askham, in the Northern Cape of South Africa, roadside conversations are essential forms of informal knowledge exchange that enable storytelling, cultural adaptation, and identity assertion. These spontaneous interactions at roadside stalls provide unique sites for authentic knowledge transfer that are distinct from formal museum narratives or heritage tourism encounters.

In the Anthropocene, evidence points to humans depleting Earth's resources at an unsustainable rate. Designers unwittingly contribute to resource depletion through traditional design approaches. As a lifelong designer-researcher, like many of my peers, our collective aim is to effect positive societal, environmental, and stakeholder impact through design. While global design frameworks often rely on purpose-driven foundations, their applicability within the South African visual communication design context is underexplored.

As the design industry is impacted by rapidly evolving technologies, tertiary graphic design curriculums must be continuously updated to ensure that students, specifically exit-level students, are prepared for the rigours of industry. Zines and DIY alternative publications have limited commercial value, and so may be regarded as less important than learning units that respond to the commercial (and increasingly digital) nature of industry. This paper argues that not only do zines remain relevant, but that the inclusion of a zine project in an undergraduate design curriculum is a valuable addition to the programme.

Mass intervention is crucial when tackling pressing social issues, such as gender-based violence. One method in approaching this is the use of the public service announcement (PSA). Traditional PSAs, such as posters and short films, are linear media forms. They rely on passive viewership and an assumption of audience behavioural change, following engagement with the artefact. This limits the PSA’s potential to inspire long-term, sustained, societal change as the effectiveness is highly dependent on the cognitive engagement of the viewer with the content. My research suggests that media employing the use of decision-based fictional narratives, such as interactive film, is more effective in enacting change.

City branding involves establishing unique identities for cities using branding principles. While Johannesburg and Cape Town are among Africa's best-branded cities, their branding strategies were largely top-down, lacking collaborative stakeholder engagement. In the wake of the global pandemic that severely impacted tourism, there is an urgent need to revise these strategies through a co-creative approach.

In South Africa, city branding activities can benefit the local tourism sector, which was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with strict lockdown measures leading to a standstill in tourism activities throughout 2020 and 2021. As restrictions eased and businesses in the sector aimed to revive tourism, innovative approaches became necessary.

Ubuntu philosophy is based on the premise that umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person because of other people). Ubuntu emphasises empathy, respect, and sensitivity as core tenets. Ubuntu principles are part of the teaching philosophy of Design for Social Change (DSC) that we use in our visual communication design course at a university of technology in South Africa. This teaching philosophy seeks to find solutions that will not only foster aesthetically pleasing and functional creative outputs from students but will also address the root causes of social problems and empower communities to create change that is enduring and sustainable.

This study aimed to identify the measures taken by a large international advertising company to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, and how these measures could be applied to design education. We interviewed a senior business partner of the company and determined the measures they took and their business variables affected by the pandemic. The results show how the pandemic affected interaction between design professionals; how they develop and present their creative solutions and how they brainstorm, collaborate, and remain inspired. The company will not be returning to their previous way of operating, and neither do they see the need to do so.

Scholarship has many dimensions, such as the scholarship of research/discovery; the scholarship of integration, application, and teaching; and the scholarship of public and democratic engagement where knowledge is co-constructed. These broader notions of scholarship challenge the traditional understanding of a university and position scholars and researchers in a broader socio-economic, historical, and cultural context. Design as a field developed and widened as a result of new challenges and opportunities – for example the fourth industrial revolution – and changes in the discipline.

The study qualitatively explored the local communication-design-education landscape and identified the structures, nature, challenges and role players. Theoretical models with the potential to guide the development of postgraduate design education were analysed. These are the Mode 1, 2 and 3 models, Innovation Triple, Quadruple and Quintuple Helix models, as well as research approaches that have the potential to better align academia with industry, such as practice-based and practice-led research, recognition of prior learning and work-integrated learning.

Following a query in 2018 by the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) alumni office to establish in which industries or companies UJ alumni were predominantly employed, information was gathered by members of the department of Graphic Design and data accumulated on a large number of alumni from the Department of Graphic Design.

Typography is constantly shifting its form according to technologies and audiences. Understanding the constant motions of typography is critical in designing forms of visual communication. In addition, current digital technologies provide novel opportunities for users to participate and co-create new typographic conventions. Online ‘fandoms’ consist of communities with interests in cultural phenomena, ranging from fan art to celebrities, to artefacts. Fandoms are an example of user-generated content with strong typographic shifts.

This paper reports on the use of object biography writing as a method for Communication Design students to construct knowledge in the Design Studies classroom. Students used a guideline constructed around the stages of the birth, life and death of an object to write an object biography on a mass-manufactured object of their own choice with a focus on how the object is used by individuals to construct and express gender identity.

Child-orientated sugary breakfast cereals are a prominent product feature in the dry goods section of supermarkets. Scholars in health sciences and marketing have reported on these products’ poor nutritional value and how marketers appeal to children through the use of persuasive television advertising and packaging design. This study presents a visual thematic content analysis of child- orientated breakfast cereal packaging available in local supermarkets. The results indicated that South African marketers use “friendly” and “welcoming” cartoon characters as the most prominent graphic element on breakfast cereal packaging.

Viktor Papanek, in his seminal book about ethics and design, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology  and  Social  Change (1971,  revised  1984)  declares  that  designers  share  responsibility  for humankind’s environmental mistakes, by all the products and tools that they have sold and created, either by bad design or by turning a blind eye (1984, p. 56).