INNOVATION IN COMMUNICATION DESIGN
Communication design is evolving through the intersection of visual research, creative direction, emerging technologies and new forms of storytelling, expanding how images are conceived, constructed and experienced across contemporary fashion communication and media contexts today.
WHERE RESEARCH BECOMES VISUAL COMMUNICATION
The Master of Arts in Communication Design develops the relationship between research, art direction and contemporary media. Its study plan connects integrated communication campaigns, advanced branding, multimedia visual languages, visual trends and the sociology of communication, encouraging students to consider not only how an image looks, but how it communicates within wider cultural and social contexts.
Research therefore becomes part of the creative process. Students analyse brands, magazines, visual cultures and audiences before defining concepts, styling, environments, casting and image systems. New technologies can then extend those ideas beyond the limits of conventional production, allowing students to explore alternative forms of fashion imagery, editorial storytelling and campaign development.
This reflects Istituto Marangoni’s wider Research & Innovation approach, where student projects and research-led learning are used to transform ideas into creative solutions and new forms of knowledge.
AI as a new space for art direction
The six projects presented here explore artificial intelligence not as a single aesthetic, but as a creative environment for communication design.
Students use generative tools to construct spaces that cannot exist physically, alter conventional relationships between body and environment, reinterpret art-historical references, visualise psychological states or imagine campaign worlds beyond the constraints of traditional production.
What connects the projects is the role of creative direction. AI may generate, transform or extend imagery, but the student defines the research territory, selects references, determines styling and casting, controls atmosphere and composition, evaluates outputs and develops the final editorial or advertising system.
This approach is consistent with Istituto Marangoni’s broader use of generative AI as a critical and project-based tool for visual storytelling, concept development and experimentation rather than as a replacement for creative talent.
Discover the Course
Discover the Communication Design course and explore how creative research, visual storytelling, AI and emerging technologies are shaping new approaches to fashion imagery, editorial design and contemporary visual communication.
Here, Floating in the Time Forever
Fashion suspended between weight and time
Andrea Besenzoni investigates suspension as an alternative to speed and progression. Influenced by Self Service Magazine, contemporary art, design and philosophical research, the project uses AI to remove conventional physical rules. Floating bodies, chairs and balloons create a minimal editorial language in which fashion exists between movement and stillness, presence and absence.
The Interruption
Fashion enters a painterly digital space
Julie Vestergaard Jakobsen places contemporary fashion inside the silent interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi, connecting ISSUE ISSUE’s restrained editorial language with art-historical research. AI allows the project to move between painting and photography, creating an intentionally ambiguous space where styling, light, composition and digital post-production transform historical atmosphere into a contemporary fashion editorial.
No Safe Position
Making contemporary fears visually tangible
Rossella Lozza investigates contemporary fears through the visual language of Self Service Magazine. Each image transforms an internal psychological condition—such as judgement, vulnerability, control or fragmented identity—into a symbolic fashion composition. AI enables impossible spatial and bodily situations, while restrained styling, framing and art direction maintain a consistent editorial system across the series.
Still Standing
Resilience reframed through surreal fashion campaigns
Francesca Restelli reinterprets KNWLS through a campaign built around women who remain composed inside increasingly unstable environments. Burning landscapes, flooded interiors and surreal physical conditions become visual metaphors for endurance. AI enables these impossible scenarios, while brand research, fashion styling and campaign applications ensure that the resulting imagery remains connected to KNWLS’ visual identity.
Holiday Magazine AI Editorial
Fashion reimagines remote landscapes
Dafni Babanaszi explores the relationship between fashion, place and cultural storytelling through an AI-assisted editorial inspired by Holiday Magazine. Remote environments including the Amazon, Socotra, the Danakil Depression, Mount Everest and Wulingyuan are interpreted through atmosphere rather than documentation, combining location research, casting, styling and generative image-making within a coherent travel-fashion narrative.
Flickers of Desire as a Form of Resistance
Light becomes a luxury narrative device
Aurore Mainini develops an imagined Valentino SS26 campaign through research into the Maison’s visual heritage, Alessandro Michele’s creative direction and the Fireflies collection. Drawing on ideas of darkness, fragile light and resistance, the project uses AI to construct theatrical and surreal environments where couture, symbolism and controlled illumination become part of a contemporary luxury communication language.
From Visual Experiment to Communication System
What distinguishes these projects is the transition from AI-generated image to designed communication.
The final image is only one stage of the process. Research establishes the cultural and visual context; creative direction defines styling, casting, setting and narrative; AI enables experimentation; and editorial design transforms selected outputs into magazine spreads, advertising campaigns, outdoor formats or other communication assets.
The projects therefore demonstrate different applications of the same broader workflow:
research → concept → art direction → AI experimentation → selection → visual system → communication output
This progression is particularly relevant to contemporary Communication Design, where images increasingly move across physical and digital environments and where the designer must understand both the strategic purpose of communication and the technical possibilities offered by new media.
Innovation through Student Practice
These six projects provide a practical view of how research and innovation can enter communication education.
Rather than producing one recognisable “AI aesthetic”, students use technology to investigate very different questions: how fashion can interact with art history, how psychological states can become images, how brand values can be amplified through impossible scenarios, how place can become narrative, how luxury can communicate symbolically, or how the laws of time and gravity can be suspended within an editorial world.
The common element is human-directed experimentation. Technology expands the range of possible images; research and creative judgement determine their meaning.
In this sense, the projects demonstrate how Communication Design can operate as a field where visual culture, critical thinking, art direction and emerging technologies continuously inform one another.