What is Graphic Design?
Graphic design is a craft where professionals create visual content to communicate messages. By applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, designers use typography and pictures to meet users’ specific needs and focus on the logic of displaying elements in interactive designs, to optimize the user experience.
Graphic Design is about Molding the User Experience Visually
Graphic design is an ancient craft, dating back past Egyptian hieroglyphs to at least 17,000-year-old cave paintings. It’s a term that originated in the 1920s’ print industry. It continues to cover a range of activities including logo creation. Graphic design in this sense concerns aesthetic appeal and marketing.
Graphic designers attract viewers using images, color and typography. However, graphic designers working in user experience (UX) design must justify stylistic choices regarding, say, image locations and font with a human-centered approach. That means you need to focus on—and seek to empathize the most with—your specific users while you create good-looking designs that maximize usability. Aesthetics must serve a purpose—in UX design we don’t create art for art’s sake. So, graphic designers must branch into visual design. When designing for UX, you should:
Consider the information architecture of your interactive designs, to ensure accessibility for users.
Leverage graphic design skills to create work that considers the entire user experience, including users’ visual processing abilities.
For instance, if an otherwise pleasing mobile app can’t offer users what they need in several thumb-clicks, its designer/s will have failed to marry graphic design to user experience. The scope of graphic design in UX covers the creation of beautiful designs that users find highly pleasurable, meaningful and usable.
“Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.”
— John Maeda, President of Rhode Island School of Design
Graphic Design is Emotional Design
Although to work in the digital age means you must design with interactive software, graphic design still revolves around age-old principles. It’s crucial that you strike the right chord with users from their first glance—hence graphic design’s correspondence with emotional design. As a graphic designer, then, you should have a firm understanding of color theory and how vital the right choice of color scheme is. Color choices must reflect not only the organization (e.g., blue suits banking) but also users’ expectations (e.g., red for alerts; green for notifications to proceed). You should design with an eye for how elements match the tone (e.g., sans-serif fonts for excitement or happiness). You also need to design for the overall effect, and note how you shape users’ emotions as you guide them from, for instance, a landing page to a call to action. Often, graphic designers are involved in motion design for smaller screens. They will carefully monitor how their works’ aesthetics match their users’ expectations. They can enhance their designs’ usability in a flowing, seamless experience by anticipating the users’ needs and mindsets. With user psychology in mind, it’s important to stay focused on some especially weighty graphic design considerations, namely these:
- Symmetry and Balance (including symmetry types)
- Flow
- Repetition
- Pattern
- The Golden Ratio (i.e., proportions of 1:1.618)
- The Rule of Thirds (i.e., how users’ eyes recognize good layout)
- Typography (encompassing everything from font choice to heading weight)
- Audience Culture (regarding color use—e.g., red as an alert or, in some Eastern cultures, a signal of good fortune—and reading pattern: e.g., left to right in Western cultures)
Overall, your mission—as far as graphic design goes in UX and UI design—is to display information harmoniously. You should ensure that beauty and usability go hand in hand, and therefore your design can discreetly carry your organization’s ideals to your users. When you establish a trustworthy visual presence, you hint to users that you know what they want to do – not just because you’ve arranged aesthetically pleasing elements that are where your users expect to find them, or help them intuit their way around, but because the values which your designs display mirror theirs, too. Your visual content will quickly decide your design’s fate, so be sure not to overlook the slightest trigger that may put users off.
9 types of graphic design with examples
Here are 9 of the most common types of graphic design with examples and links to help you get your creative juices flowing.
1. Brand design
Brand design is the practice of setting guidelines and best practices for a company to use across all branded materials to ensure a consistent brand identity. Brand designers help communicate the personality, tone, and core messaging of a company, so this work involves a lot of strategy.
Brand design work includes but is not limited to:
- designing logos and setting clear guidelines for how they’re to be used
- designing letterhead, icons, and various illustrations
- selecting brand colors and setting clear guidelines for their usage
- creating or selecting fonts and typography guidelines
- creating templates that follow the brand guidelines and can be used by marketing, growth, and other teams
- packaging design and graphics for product design
Good brand designers have an understanding of marketing design, web design, logo design, and many other aspects of graphic design because the decisions they make will affect all subsequent design projects for that brand. If you’ve never worked with brand design guidelines before, check out Starbucks’ creative expression website. This is a great example of various initiatives included in brand design and the type of guidelines a brand designer is expected to create to maintain a consistent visual identity.
Brand design is evolving at a particularly fast pace. Because as technology develops, brands are always looking for new ways to engage with their target audience — which means their brand design needs to support new and shifting channels.
Designers like Tamara Sredojevic often find themselves creating or adapting brand design for new and emerging platforms. So, if you enjoy taking on new challenges and keeping up with the latest trends, brand design might be a great fit for you.
2. Marketing design
Marketing design is graphic design for marketing initiatives. Marketing designers may work on small projects, such as the layout of a promotional email, or large multi-faceted projects, such as designing the booth, hand-outs, and print materials for trade shows.
Marketing designers may work on visual design for:
- emails
- newsletters
- billboards and other signage
- posters
- print ads
- trade show booths
- physical mailers
- website assets
Marketing design and brand design do share some commonalities, but where brand designers look to set the overall guidelines and messaging for a brand, marketing designers typically focus on communicating a specific message for a single campaign or even a single type of asset or platform. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.
If we think of this in terms of fashion, marketing designers would likely work on at least four separate campaigns throughout the year — winter, spring, summer, fall — which would all need to adhere to overall the brand design. Or, if we refer back to the Starbucks example, all marketing campaigns throughout the year would need to adhere to the same creative expression guidelines.
3. Web design
Many graphic artists work on visual elements that will be used on a website. But it’s important to note that web design and graphic design are different.
Designing a great website is a multidisciplinary undertaking because websites are interactive, rather than fixed assets like a brochure or a magazine. You need graphic design skills as well as experience with user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, which is why many websites are designed by teams of multiple professionals with complementary skill sets.
Web designers may work on projects including:
- Creating icons and buttons
- Creating images, illustrations, and other graphics
- Designing web page layouts
- Creating various interactive design elements on a website
- Creating videos and gifs
- Helping ensure visual elements are optimized for all devices (desktop, mobile, etc.)
- Working with web development, UX, UI, and marketing design teams to improve overall experience for site visitors
Of course, plenty of graphic designers are also web designers with knowledge of UX design principles and have created beautiful websites and mobile apps without the support of a large team. And thanks to no-code platforms like Webflow, designers can create stunning interactive websites without needing extensive knowledge of coding.
4. Illustration design
Illustrations are often included as part of web, marketing, and brand design — but they’re also used in other ways. Some designers focus solely on offering illustrations and will work with larger design teams, contributing individual assets for various projects.
Illustrators may design visual assets for:
- children’s books
- t-shirts and other wearables
- cards and stationery
- websites
- social media
- video and interactive media
- marketing campaigns
Illustration style and design process can vary drastically from designer to designer. Some artists work almost exclusively in digital formats using tools such Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or Procreate and others blend digital media with physical media, preferring to begin with a pencil and paper.
5. Type design
Some graphic designers specialize in creating or selecting typography, typeface, or fonts.
Type design can include:
- Creating custom lettering and numerals
- Writing or digitally creating typography assets
- Selecting fonts and creating typography guidelines for a brand
- Humans rely heavily on words to communicate messaging, so type designers collaborate on a wide array of projects. Type designers may be hired to create logos or wedding invitations and they sometimes contribute to brand design by creating, selecting, or pairing fonts. It’s also common for type designers to create assets for web, marketing, product, or package design.
6. Infographic design
At their core, infographics are simply representations of data or information that can be consumed visually. Infographics come in the form of 2D illustrations, interactive elements on a website, or even videos. The common thread is that they help the viewer more easily understand a bulk of information or complex concepts.
7. Textile and surface design
Textile graphic designers may create designs for:
- fabrics
- wallpaper
- carpets
- furniture
Many textile designers have experience not only designing graphics, but actually printing or creating the textiles themselves. To be a great textile designer, you need to have an understanding of design principles, such as color theory and hierarchy, as well as an understanding of what’s possible when using different dyes and fabrics because the material itself will affect the final look of a design.
8. Packaging design
From food to gadgets to designer jewelry, the packaging that items are transported in is often just as important as the items themselves. Product packaging designers aim to show off or complement the items inside the packages.
9. Editorial design
The term “graphic design” originated from editorial graphic design and today it is still a very important part of both print and digital editorial publications. Publication design spans:
- books
- magazines
- newspapers
- emails and digital publications
Editorial graphic design helps set the tone for a publication and can amplify the written word.
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- Logo type
- Did you know there's an array of different logo types to choose from? What choice you make depends on the message you want your logo to convey - You can have a logo with just text or just an an icon or maybe it should have both? This is a critical decision in the logo design process.
- Logo colors
- There's a whole world of color theory and psychology that most consumers aren't aware of. As a business owner it pays to choose the right colors for your logo. Want to convey seriousness or maybe you want your brand to appear adventurous or sporty. Choosing the right colors for your logo is key to getting the message right.
- Logo font
- It's not only the colors and logo type that convey meaning, so too can your fonts selection. Clean, bold typography can help to re-in force a trustworthy message, whereas a softer font can mean something more playful? Choosing the right font is vital to getting a great logo.
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