Southbank News × VCA Graphic Interventions

As you’re turning the pages of this month’s edition of Southbank News, you’ll notice a series of green graphics throughout – a creative initiative conducted in partnership with The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).

This project invited students from the Master of Design and Production (Graphic Design) program at VCA in Southbank to create a series of small-scale graphic interventions for this November 2025 edition of Southbank News. Each contribution emerges from field research undertaken in and around the Southbank neighbourhood, including the VCA campus, Melbourne Arts Precinct, public spaces, and the rhythms of its cultural and civic life.

The project began with acts of close observation such as walking, listening, mapping, drawing, writing and collecting material fragments. From these traces, students identified small moments of attention such as gestures, textures and environmental patterns, and translated them into graphic form. The results are subtle but deliberate, made up of marks, patterns, typographic rhythms and linework that quietly thread throughout this issue of the paper, all unified in a high-contrast green. Over several weeks, students spent time in Southbank, returning to the same streets, pathways and public spaces to observe their changing character. Through this repeated engagement, they came to know the neighbourhood anew, not only through what they saw but through its rhythms and atmospheres. Their interventions can be read as a kind of graphic visual essay, a collection of impressions and abstractions shaped by attention, duration and place.

Each student developed an individual visual language shaped by their encounters with Southbank. Yu Li explored contrast, working between geometric and organic forms, between randomness and order, between the remarkable and the modest. Xinru Yang treated the newspaper page as a city surface, a wall or a ground plane, drawing connections between print and site. Srishti Oberoi traced recurring patterns in sound and atmosphere, translating sensory experience into visual rhythm. Hongyu Chen distilled geometric motifs from the built environment, designed to function as both individual units and repeating sequences. Jaye Wang reflected on the transition between old and new in Southbank, inviting readers to think about the area’s shifting identities. Hannah Dong developed a suite of symbols drawn from the local architecture that tessellate to create pattern and structure. Yongyi Zhu translated the ambient sounds of Southbank into a graphic language. Lane Wang’s design imitates painted street markings, sidewalk lines and car park stripes, while acknowledging the bee populations that also inhabit the precinct.

Together, these contributions form a quiet and layered reflection on Southbank. They remind us that graphic design emerges from attentive looking, and that the smallest marks can shape how a place is read.

This project was conceived and produced by Ela Egidy and delivered by tutors Emile Zile and Tristan Main as part of the Master of Design & Production (Graphic Design) program at the VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne. •