You will create a website for an imaginary real estate agency.
A current example would be : Civilization: Our Life in Focus (showing from March 13, 2026 to July 19, 2026 at Museum für Gestaltung Zurich) which shows the works of around 100 world-renowned photographers.
Examples of dedicated exhibition websites:
Designer Rob Giampietro has shared a list of one-week design challenges, that he created for communication design students at Parsons School of Design in 2005.
Your task will be to tackle nine one-week design challenges that are outcome-specific. Some of your solutions will be successes; some will be failures. All of the projects are designed to teach you more about your process. In the end, you will choose three of the projects to refine and complete.
Gianpietro explains:
Though this class only has nine one-week projects, I have an ever-growing pool of projects do draw from, depending on how the class is doing, individual needs, and my own intuition. They tend to be very simple, short, and open-ended. At least a few are adapted from some of the great teachers I’ve had over the years.
Some of the 18 projects:
Some of the assignments presented in the book Taking a Line for a Walk (2014) are extremely short and consist in just one sentence. Here are some of them:
Surprise
Design and make a book from any material that couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t be used to make a book.
Neil McGuire, Glasgow School of Art, 2014.
Identity
Design stationery for your own graphic design office.
Alvin Eisenmann, Yale School of Art, 1982.
Poster problem
Choose a theme and design a poster for each of these categories: graphic poster / typographic poster / photographic poster.
Kohei Sugiura, HfG Ulm, 1964.
A new skill
Your assignment is to learn a new skill. Present your process and/or outcome in class in printed form.
Yotam Hadar, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, 2011.
Sustainable information
Inform us about a company that claims to be green, but is actually “greenwashing”.
Joshua Trees, Central Saint Martins London, 2011.
Printing Machine
Design a drawing/printing/image-making machine, then use your machine to make a set of drawings or prints about a subject of your choice.
Unknown author, Central Saint Martins London, 2004.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
Prove this visually.
Rebecca and Mike, Central Saint Martins London, 200o.
This assignment is taken from the student publication «Output», which was created by students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm.
In the year 1961-1962, starting in October 1961, the school launched a curriculum centered on film, inside the sector «Visual communication».
On the first day, the students received the task of creating a short film on the topic of “photography”. The film is divided in 5 parts, which have each a duration of 2 minutes. Each sequence is made by one or two students. The duration of the whole film (with start/end titles) should be 12 minutes.
In every school, there are certainly some students who produce their music, play in a band, are MC-ing, are “bedroom composers” in different music styles.
This exercice aims to develop an in-school music label that showcases those young artists and their music.
Possible outcomes:
Excerpt of an interview with Nina Paim, on the archived website of the 26th Biennale of design in Brno (2014).
BB : You came across hundreds of assignments while preparing the exhibition. Do you think there are good assignments and bad assignments? Do you have a favourite assignment?
Nina Paim : Perhaps the most surprising discovery was a series of assignments from Central Saint Martins, which I received through different sources, mainly from Maziar Raein and Richard Doust (who both taught at the CSM). It turns out Saint Martins has been keeping a record of all assignments by asking teachers to fill out a “template form” containing a reason for setting/purpose, learning objectives, the brief itself, learning outcomes, schedule and codes (the latter is still a cryptic category to me). Every two weeks all tutors were asked to put up two new briefs on the “wall of briefs” (which will generate a pool of approximately 20 to 25 briefs). Students would then choose one or more briefs from the wall and attend the briefings and crits lead by that teacher. Students could do as many or as few briefs as they wanted – they were evaluated by their portfolios at the end of the school year. It’s a very nice collection and the assignments themselves are very instigating: one could do an exhibition only with those!
Pictures: two examples of Project Briefs from CSM: “Deface a symbol of our time”, by Richard Doust, 1973; and “Atrophy? no, invention”, by Geoff Fowle, 2004-05. Depicted in Taking a Line for a Walk, 2014.
An assignment posted by Rob Dobi (editorial illustrator, designer and photographer) on threads app, February 16 2026:
on my first day of teaching contemporary illustration at
RISD yesterday i had my students embrace the pure chaos timeline of making a new york times op-ed illustration within a few hours. I emailed their briefing at 1:30, sketches due at 3, finals due by 5. Everyone survived, here are a few selects.
“Waste Time Playing.” That was the concept that came up during a class in my fifth semester of university, back when I was studying Industrial Design. The challenge was to create an immersive experience that encouraged people to read Cortázar’s work —and that’s when we realized that, through play, we’re more present, we learn better, and we remember more.
Source: Manifesto for young adults, by Nebulosa Picante
Students have to create portraits for personalities in theirs city. The portraits are to be released under an open license on the Wikipedia Commons platform, so they can be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles.
In order to find suitable persons, a search can be done on Wikidata. For instance, this query searches for living persons born in the city of Lausanne, aged less than 85 years, that have a Wikipedia page but do not have a picture.
SELECT ?personne ?personneLabel ?dateNaissance ?age
WHERE {
?personne wdt:P31 wd:Q5; # être humain
wdt:P19 wd:Q807; # né à Lausanne
wdt:P569 ?dateNaissance. # date de naissance
# Ne pas avoir d'image
FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?personne wdt:P18 ?image }
# Avoir au moins un article Wikipédia
FILTER EXISTS {
?article schema:about ?personne;
schema:isPartOf ?wiki.
FILTER(CONTAINS(STR(?wiki), "wikipedia.org"))
}
# Exclure les personnes décédées
FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?personne wdt:P570 ?dateDeces }
# Exclure les personnes de plus de 85 ans
BIND(YEAR(NOW()) - YEAR(?dateNaissance) AS ?age)
FILTER(?age <= 85)
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "fr,en". }
}
ORDER BY ?personneLabelPS: this idea is quite similar to the existing Wikiportraits Project.
PPS: there’s an article by the BBC about the project, that also made me discover @badwikiphotos on Instagram.