Whenever people ask me what my major is and I say graphic design. They always have the question, what is graphic design? Does it have something to do with advertising? What are you going to do with that major? Many questions like these and more have been asked about designing.
What should we tell people that graphic design is? The dictionary explains graphic design as a visual communication by a skillful combination of text and pictures. Graphic design encompasses so much of the world and things that we look at every day. Anywhere you go, it is on signs, posters, books, packaging, menus and so many more places.
Design is not only making something look pretty
Design is not just making things look pretty is one of the most important points to get across to non-designers. A huge part of design is presenting ideas or concepts in a beautiful way but also have it serve a function. The most accomplished designers see the importance of deep research, planning and problem solving. A good designer is able to find a perfect balance between the content and design and solving the problem at hand. Through experience I have seen many projects of people that look like they were more worried about the design than the content and you can see that they don’t fit together and something is missing. When I do see good design it is when the design was made after research and careful thinking and you can see how both are working together to make something wonderful and interesting to look at. The best projects have meaning, and people care about them.
When people ask about graphic design it is important to explain that design is not just making something pretty, it is so much more, Design is making something that has meaning, importance and makes sense. This is not an easy thing to do but if done well than people will notice the difference between good design and okay design.
The difference between designers and non-designers
After working as a Graphic Designer on campus for over 3 years now, I have had a lot of chances to learn what people expect from designers. It was a huge change to move from working under Brother Burgener (a designer who knows what he is doing) to an office that had a small sense of design. The new office had the sense of design that most people in the world have, that design is to just make something look “good.” As I spent more time working there I was able to show my boss that design isn’t just cheesy catch lines and arraigning images on a poster well. Good design is well thought out and simple, but elegant ways to get the point across instead of the cheesy catch lines like, Does your resume stink, and putting a photo of a girl holding a dead fish. Design is so much more than that it has a purpose.
Another lesson that I learned while working for a boss with no design background was that you have to make your clients happy even if you don’t like the idea. While working I had to do a lot of projects for a lady who thought she new what looked good. I couldn’t convince her of anything else and her favorite font was Papyrus. Everything had to be in papyrus and she new that it looked good. I gave this client many options that were well designed and looked a lot better than what she first suggested. Sometimes non-designers think they know what looks best when they really don’t.
In the end I had to learn to design with Papyrus. I know that the projects I did for her will never go into my portfolio and didn’t look good at all, but I had to learn to work with the client and make a poster with smelly resumes and photos of dead fish and using papyrus. We as designers have to learn to work with what we get and make it look, as good as we can and sometimes it isn’t easy. Any designer, who can make papyrus look really good, is an amazing designer and I would love to learn from them.
Don’t design only to look good
It is important to design for a reason and not to just use something because it looks good. In Robert Bringhurst book Elements of typographic style; he explains how good design is thought all the way through. The design of the type is just as important as the composition and the subject. We really should use a typeface that fits our design not just because it looks good but also because it fits the concept of our design.
Web design is just as important as print or any other parts of design. Websites are to improve communication and to help people find information. Websites were a new type of design and included headers, navigation and footers, thing that had never existed before. Since the beginning of web design, many changes have been made and now there are so many more options to choose from. So many more choices in typefaces are being offered, even though the choices are still limited, design is improving a lot.
Same as print and other types of Graphic Design, in web design the functionality is just as important. The function of web design is very important to understand navigation. Now sites can be an interactive experience that looks good. Designers can now solve problems involving the navigation and moving through pages of a site, which is a very new experience.
Though my experience, the best web design are the simple but easy to navigate. The sites that use all the bells and whistles of design, too many drop shadows and Photoshop filters are very crazy and not very easy to understand and not thought through. Instead a well-designed site explores new and exciting graphics with surprising images.
The best design will be when the designers and web developers work together to understand each other. When that happens completely, the web will be a much better looking place because there will be so many more choices and opportunities for some beautiful sites. As people experiment and learn more about web design the web will start to look better and better.
