Is English a global language?! But with the help of graphics, even a three-year-old Japanese toddler can easily understand an Arabic grandmother.
Food packaging in your fridge, signs and street signs, posters, flyers, and the design of your favorite Facebook pages – all this was done by graphic designers. Every day we see hundreds of advertisements, branded products, and visual communication elements.
Graphic design is a broad concept that affects almost all areas of our lives, both in the real and in the digital world. Let’s see where it is used and what functions it performs.
Way to convey information
We use visual perception to the maximum to navigate the world and perform routine tasks.
Do you want to go to the supermarket? You need signs on houses, arrows in Google Navigator, or at least a sign with the name of the store, visible from afar. Do you want to read a book? You need a graphic designer to take care of the appropriate font and page consistency. Are you going to perform in front of an audience? Visual accompaniment will help to summarize all the most important.
An important mission of a graphic designer is to organize the chaos around and put information on the shelves.
Signboards and signs
These communication tools are needed for a person to navigate in unfamiliar territory or understand what actions are expected of him in a particular situation. Sometimes the words contain all the necessary information, then the task of the designer is to make the inscription easy to read and pleasing to the eye.
Often words are accompanied by pictures: this is necessary for structuring different messages when they are difficult to navigate. A person takes a look at a picture much faster than reading a few sentences.
And sometimes visual language becomes the only possible way of communication: signs at airports, at international conferences, and in tourist places are always complimented by images.
Sometimes words are not needed at all. For example, in road signs. All drivers know their meaning and quickly navigate through the pictures: there is simply no time to read the text while driving.
In different countries, signs may vary slightly: designers are working to make them as concise, understandable, and recognizable as possible. This is especially important when fast reactions are required from road users.
Signboards, tablets, and short instructions surround us everywhere and help us to live peacefully. We perceive a lot of information unconsciously – this is the work of graphic designers, which often goes unnoticed.
Presentation design and infographics
Let’s move on to the products of visual communication with which we interact consciously. Tables, diagrams, infographics, and presentations are needed to structure a large amount of information. Listening to an interesting speaker or reading the instructions for a washing machine, we concentrate. Therefore, the design of these materials can be more detailed than a street sign.
The task of a designer when developing an infographic or presentation is to make the language of pictures simple and understandable. Good illustrations are more effective than long texts and are understandable to native speakers of any language.
Layout of books, magazines and web pages
The design is also available without pictures. Reading a good paper book, you may not even guess how many hours the designer spent on the layout. Properly selected fonts, line spacing, margins, and word hyphenation allow the eyes to get less tired.
If you think the value of typography is exaggerated, look through cheap books from the nineties: then low-quality printing flourished, lines on two pages of one sheet did not match and shone through thin paper. Reading this book, you will quickly get tired.
There are some nuances in the “digit”: the designer makes sure that you do not have to run your eyes around the large screen, that the paragraphs differ from the line spacing, and that the transition to a new line does not complicate reading.
Marketing Tool
At the mention of Apple, a bitten apple pops up before our eyes, and remembering Sberbank, we imagine a green logo. Graphic design serves for brand recognition and promotion in the market.
Form style
Every major company has a logo. However, the concept of corporate identity is much broader: it is a set of colors, fonts, patterns, and rules for their combination with each other. A whole range of graphic elements allows you to maintain the image of the brand.
A good corporate identity is developed for at least five years if the company plans to live long. Therefore, such graphics are less influenced by trends than advertising or web design.
Corporate identity design is usually presented in the brand book format. This is a quick guide showing acceptable and unacceptable logo uses, color matching, font pairings, and more. Brand books also present the design of the main media – it may have specific features depending on the required shape or size.
What do the logo and corporate identity give? First, they create a positive brand image in the minds of consumers, employees, and partners. Secondly, they allow you to bring all branded products into uniformity and simplify current design tasks.
Outdoor advertising and printing
Advertising design is a more creative area of graphic design. Advertising campaigns change quickly, so strict conciseness and planning for years ahead are not required here.
The purpose of advertising is to sell a specific product to a specific segment of the target audience within a given timeframe. And the first task on the way to this goal is to attract the attention of the viewer, to surprise him with something bright and unusual, to make him hold his eyes.
Advertising design is a marker of our time because it changes very quickly with fashion. If you look at photographs from twenty years ago, architecture or even people’s clothes may look quite modern, while posters and banners will look old-fashioned.
Advertising uses trendy graphics and decorative fonts to make the message stand out from the crowd. But due to the exploitation of trends, advertising is short-lived, and every time designers have to look for new ways to surprise the public.
Internet promotion
The average city dweller does not part with gadgets. If twenty years ago almost any graphic design was prepared for printing in a printing house, now this is far from the case. Advertising banners on websites, design of communities in social networks, landing pages, and selling websites are in great demand.
You don’t have to be a tech guru to create beautiful posts or ads for the web. But when developing a whole site ( web designers do this ), even knowledge in programming will come in handy.
On the one hand, the Internet has simplified the work of designers: there is no need to deal with prepress. On the other hand, other important criteria come to the fore – for example, file size and easy readability of the picture from any screen. The Internet has also opened up the possibilities of animation for advertising: motion graphics are actively used both on social networks and on websites.
Element of digital and printed products
Graphic design helps convey information to people and promote products. But sometimes it can be directly part of the product. See what’s on your wallpaper, favorite T-shirt, or smartphone case. Printing technologies allow us to work with many materials, so printed prints have replaced embroidery and painting for us.
Now think of a screensaver with titles for your favorite series or an app menu on your phone that you use every day. Graphic designers also had a hand in these products.
The more complex the task, the more competencies are required for the job. In a broad sense, the graphic design includes illustration, 3D modeling, animation, and web development. All these areas are related to the creation of graphics.
Many designers have competencies in related fields, but it is impossible to cover everything. In a narrow sense, graphic design is usually understood as the creation of static graphics for printing or posting on the web. Some narrow their specialization even more and do whatever they want, for example, exclusively with logos or layout.
