The Role of Design in Online Communication for Higher Education Institutions During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This chapter presents a study developed at the Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Minho (Portugal) about the importance of design in the online digital communication of a Higher Education Institution, in a pandemic context. The pandemic scenario, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus which in turn is responsible for Covid-19, experienced in Portugal since the beginning of 2020, resulted in rigorous social and human relationship restrictions, forcing individuals, institutions and companies to find alternatives to answer to these limitations. One of the fields that suffered most from these restrictions was the communication one, not only at an interpersonal level, but also at an institutional level. The study presented here follows, therefore, a methodology that crosses literature review with semi-structured interviews and focuses on how communication design can contribute to the improvement of institutional communication in socially dramatic moments like those experienced during the pandemic, which isolated academic communities of teachers, staff and students, reducing their interactions to virtual online environments. Communication design, through its main structuring elements, such as typography and colour, has the potential to “humanise” the messages with information about health and safety, academic procedures, among other formal information usually transmitted by universities to their communities, giving them emotional and appealing attributes. In this way, the communication design contributes to draw the receiver's attention to important information, reinforcing the effectiveness of communication.