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Design: Visual Communication

Planning your search

Before you begin looking for resources for your assessment or project, focus on planning your search strategy. A little time spent on this now will save you time and frustration later. Here are the steps:

Summarise your question or topic

This sounds obvious, but to begin searching you should be clear about the topic of your research or assessment.

If this is for an assessment, ensure you review your assessment instructions. You may already have received a topic, a statement or clues to guide your search.

Write down a summary of your topic and check that it's clear and focused. This will help guide you in the sort of information you are looking for.


Identify the keywords

Now highlight, underline or circle the keywords or main concepts in your summary. These words can help you build your search strategy and set parameters.


Think of alternative search words for each concept

These can be synonyms, related words, abbreviations, acronyms and other words that are specific to your topic.

To discover synonyms, refer to a thesaurus (such as https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus) and see what other words could be used.

Doing this will ensure that you don't miss out on any useful articles that you might otherwise miss if you only use one or two search terms.


Be clever

Now you have a strong basis for your search, it doesn't stop there.

Improve your search strategy using special characters and symbols to create clever search strings. There is more detail about these advanced techniques in the section below.


Document your search

This will help you plan your search properly and remember the techniques.

Download the planner below and follow the steps to create your own search strategy.

 

 


Advanced search techniques

Use these advanced search techniques to improve your search results.

Phrase searching narrows a search to show results that contain an exact phrase.

This is useful when you want to search for a certain string of words.

To conduct a phrase search, add double quote marks around two or more words you want to search for.

For example: searching for "portrait photography" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word "portrait" or "photography" appear separately.


Truncation and wildcard searching broadens a search to show results that include words with variant endings or spellings.

To conduct a truncation search, use an asterix character * to indicate where the variant ending starts.

For example, searching for photograph* will return records that contain any of these words:  photograph, photographic, photography, photographer.

Wildcard searching, using the symbol '?", is useful for words that have slight differences in spelling e.g. 'women' and 'woman', 'organisation' and 'organization'.  Insert the ? to replace the variant letter to retrieve both versions of a word, e.g. wom?n; organi?ation.


Boolean searching allows you to combine keywords with operators (such as AND, OR, NOT) to produce more relevant results

Using the word AND between two search terms narrows a search to show results containing both terms.

Conversely, using the word OR between two terms broadens a search to show results containing either term.

Using NOT will narrow your search by excluding certain results from your search, however as the video on the next tab shows it should be used with care as this technique can remove relevant results.
 


Video: What are boolean operators (1:36)


Search examples

Some useful keywords for searching might include:

  • design history
  • 20th century
  • graphic arts history
  • typograph*
  • type and type founding,
  • brand*
  • display of merchandise
  • advertising
  • brand name products
  • corporate image

Try Advanced Search for more precise results:

In the above search, brand* (with asterisk) will search for all word endings - i.e. brands, branding, and "social media" will find results that match both words together as a phrase.

If you are searching for an example of a particular brand or communication campaign, you may find very little that has been written about that specific scenario. In these cases, focus on the particular strategy or theme you are looking at that might be applicable to the same scenario.