When talking about the topic selection of the work collection, each student hopes to achieve the effect of "starting a good start" for the work collection by finding topics that are niche, compelling, and preferably have never been done. Not to mention the difficulty of finding such a theme, this idea is not correct in the first place. The uniqueness is relative. Every year, the admissions officer needs to review thousands of collections of works from all over the world to find topics that they have not seen and that accurately correspond to their interests. The probability may be even smaller than that of love at first sight. There are no boring topics in the world, only boring angles. The art major is not only an imaginative creation, but also needs to rely on our solid professional foundation and clear logical thinking to open new ideas. That is to say, the topic selection of common collections of works is not necessarily boring, but depends on how we do it. Today, we have summarized several common topics in your portfolio creation, and introduced them in the form of cases. How to select topics in your portfolio? What can we do to make the selection of works interesting? How to find the entry point to make the topic of "Bad Street" more interesting?

　　 01. Hot topics of current affairs

#Creative thinking should dare to break through habits

With the development of social software, we can keep up with the hot issues anytime and anywhere, and because these events usually have their own topics, they have become the first choice of many students' portfolio projects, such as the topics we often see about garbage classification, women's rights, artificial intelligence and so on.

Because of the continuous publicity of the media and the continuous development of events, more and more people pay attention to the topic itself and express their views, which also makes many students worry, will such popular topics cause the admissions officer's aesthetic fatigue?

Of course, if we only focus on "shouting slogans", describing events and expressing some general directions, it is really difficult to stand out from the same type of topics, let alone show our uniqueness and creativity.

Therefore, for students who choose such topics, the most important thing is to find new entry points and personal thinking about events. Usually, such hot topics have profound social factors behind them. Students can also go deep into digging, integrate their own understanding, and then extend the solutions after thinking.

If you can see the big from the small, and integrate the big events with your feelings, experiences and thoughts, the common themes will also become straightforward.

Natural light has been accepted Royal College of Art Ziyi, a student majoring in graphic design, mostly discusses regional culture and global hot topics in her collection of works.

One of them is about the topic of "bike sharing". In fact, we often see this topic in other types of works, which is not unique. But when Ziyi told the teacher the direction of this topic, the teacher did not reject it because it was common.

Instead, we searched a lot of materials with Ziyi, read many reports, books, etc., and finally found a new perspective to explore the theme of "symbiosis". In fact, this kind of social problem, for people, the most direct human sense, may be more impact and thinking than vision, so Ziyi thought of using the relationship between human body and clothing to show.

First, she disassembled the bicycle through a series of posters and connected it with the human body system. The final posters were spliced together with postcards, which can be used for sending. In this way, she expressed the concept of "sharing". Although poster is the most common form of expression, when it combines emotion and communication, it will become more interesting and interactive.

Because the project itself has the concept of human body, Ziyi also associates with the social rights and interests of women groups, so the project also adds a work of performance art, which combines the body of women with the structure of bicycles, and makes a group of "awkward" clothes to express the essence of bicycles.

　　 02. Focus on topics of vulnerable groups

#The best point is to dig deeply into life experience

Concerns about vulnerable groups range from racial issues to aesthetic prejudices. As people pay more attention to human rights issues and mental health, this unfair social phenomenon is often criticized and discussed through different channels.

Art is originally a subject to express diverse views and study spiritual needs. Therefore, the topic of paying attention to vulnerable groups has become a project theme that many students will choose. In fact, this topic itself is not boring, but it is often a deep topic. If the depth of students' research is not enough and there is no real perception, it will not only be limited in the form of expression, but also make the topic selection of the entire collection seem empty.

I met a product design student who designed a tent for refugees. But all his research on refugees was just a few pages of reports from social news, and the rest was just a functional transformation of the tent itself. This kind of work seemed to be forced to attach the label of social topics, instead of showing the uniqueness of the topic, It also shows our shallowness in research and thinking.

For most students who are only about 20 years old, too many deep topics are really difficult to control, and they are faced with well-informed admissions officers. Once we can not find a suitable angle, it will be too "pretentious". But if we can take a sincere attitude and take our own experience and insights as the topic, the results will naturally be more impressive.

Enroll SVA New York Institute of Visual Arts Xie, a pure art major, is a girl who easily lacks confidence and cares about other people's words and comments, which also reminds her of the same social groups as her. Tagged symbolic definitions are infinitely enlarged, and many people will be troubled by the same problems.

Therefore, she collected a lot of other people's evaluations, reflected the relationship between labeling and behavior through process records, and transformed the feelings in the whole work interaction process into a visual form, becoming an installation work in the visual form, to express this psychological activity of self-confidence. It is also hoped that these can lead to some public reflection and so on.

In addition to professional ability and logical thinking, overseas colleges and universities also attach great importance to students' artistic quality, which includes the depth of thought. Students also need to pay attention to reflecting their own cognition, understanding and real perception of society when creating artistic works.

　　 03. Too earthy topic

#Your creativity is limited by the selection of works

Since ancient times, art has been regarded as a synonym for elegance, which seems to be far away from such topics as grounding, fuel, rice, oil and salt. Therefore, many students also want to try their best to choose the direction of being tall to better reflect our aesthetic standards and high-level interests.

However, in today's increasingly diversified art, art colleges and universities also aim to promote the substantive progress of society to constantly expand the boundaries of art. The requirements for applicants are no longer confined to exquisite conceptual expression, but pay more attention to the practical design results in students' works.

This is not only reflected in the functional and commercial oriented architecture or industrial design, but also in the clothing and pure art majors that always give people a sense of unconstrained style. We can also use expressions close to life to show our creativity.

Huyu, who was admitted to Huangyi Fashion Design, selected the topic of his work collection named "We all have the same answer", which is about the design of school uniforms in junior high schools. His inspiration came from the phenomenon of cheating in exams. After in-depth investigation of the reasons for cheating, he found that behind these reasons are the constraints of school and family education, and students' self deception.

In exam oriented education, students are victims of assimilation, and school uniforms are also products of assimilation. He wants to start with clothes and hope to break this assimilation phenomenon. By means of graffiti, he abstracted many visual elements of classroom and books. Both the subject matter and the visual expression reflected a kind of vitality of grounding.

For our students, we can also try this simple topic more often. Sometimes, returning to the essence of art to find some materials that are closest to life will also liberate our creative ideas to a certain extent and improve the appeal of design.

To sum up, for students, it is really unnecessary to be too obsessed with the uniqueness of the topic and whether it will make people see. We can also find from the cases that most of the works that are truly recognized by colleges and universities are not special topics, but they are all project works with real insights combined with students' personal views and in-depth research. When choosing a topic for a collection of works, students can often jump out of the professional category, focus on their own experience or interests, find a most sincere entry point, explore the meaning behind the theme, and extend their most unique style.

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