Graphic design is not just about making things look pretty. Graphic designers are communicators. Let’s look at an example. An art teacher has started regular painting classes in the city. The class at the Botanical Garden doesn’t have many registrations, but the same class at the local cultural center is completely sold out, with queries pouring in from parents for other timings. Parents tell the teacher they didn’t know that there was another class. Puzzled, she asks the designer for help.
The poster looks nice. What might the problem be? Ingrid, our young designer, quickly finds out what is wrong. The registration details for the class at the Botanical Garden are getting lost among all the distracting decorations. No wonder people are not registering. Using her graphic design skills and knowledge. She adjusts the layout. It was not just about moving the registration details, but making the entire message clear. There, it’s done.
And guess what? This week, the class at the Botanical Garden had a full house. Problem solved. It’s not always that easy, but this is what graphic design is about. Using design principles to communicate clearly and esthetically.
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 taps, its designer will have failed to marry graphic design to user experience. The scope of graphic design in UX covers creating 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, 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.
Learn More about Graphic Design
Take our course, The Ultimate Guide to Visual Design.
Our encyclopedia addresses graphic design’s place in the world of UX.
This is a first-hand account on transitioning from graphic design to UX design.
Read this incisive piece that examines the similarities and differences between graphic and UX design.
Questions related to Graphic Design
How much do graphic designers make?
The salary of a graphic designer can vary widely based on several factors, including experience, geographical location, and expertise level. On average, the annual salary for graphic designers ranges between $43,000 and $66,000. This range reflects the earnings of many professionals in the graphic design field, a profession that remains essential and valued across various industries.
While graphic design offers a respectable salary, professionals seeking higher earning potential might transition to UX design. UX designers responsible for crafting user-friendly and functional digital interfaces are in high demand, leading to attractive compensation packages. For graphic designers considering a career change, transitioning to UX design can be strategic. Learn more about the benefits of this transition and how to navigate it in this detailed guide on changing your career from Graphic Design to UX Design.
What do graphic designers do?
Graphic designers are creative professionals who use their artistic skills to create visual content for various mediums. They work on projects such as designing logos, brochures, websites, and advertisements. Using various tools and software, they aim to communicate a message through their visual designs and help businesses and organizations achieve their goals.
What is the difference between graphic and visual design?
Graphic design and visual design are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference between the two. Both graphic and visual designers rely on design principles and knowledge of color theory, typography and layout to create effective and engaging designs. Graphic designers primarily focus on communication (for example, logos and advertisements) while visual designers focus on product experience (for example, the user interfaces of websites and applications). Visual designers may incorporate graphic design elements to create a consistent user experience across all touchpoints.
Graphic design is a much older profession and has a strong association with print media. With the advance of technology, graphic designers’ deliverables also became digital. Visual designers have a broader skill set, combining skills of graphic designers along with an understanding of interface designer.
If you’re interested in learning more about these important design principles, check our visual design course. Develop the skills you need to create stunning designs that are both functional and visually appealing.
How to become a graphic designer?
In addition to possessing a degree in graphic design or a related field, there are excellent online courses available that can provide you with all the essential visual skills you need. Platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, and Coursera offer a variety of courses focused on developing practical skills and building portfolios. These flexible and affordable courses provide a fantastic opportunity to learn graphic design and grow your skills.
If you’re interested in pivoting to interaction design, there are fantastic courses available that can help you change your career to UX or a related field. There are even tailored learning paths available to guide you in your journey. Best of luck on your chosen career path!
Is graphic design a good career?
Yes, graphic design can be a great career choice for those with a passion for creativity and design. With the rise of digital media, the demand for skilled graphic designers has grown. However, it’s important to note that the field is competitive and requires continuous learning and development of skills.
Graphic designers can work in a variety of industries, from advertising to web design, and can have a range of job titles, such as art director or multimedia designer. Overall, graphic design can be a fulfilling and rewarding career path for those willing to put in the work.
How do you learn graphic design?
Learning graphic design involves understanding design principles, mastering software, and developing a strong portfolio. Start with online courses or a design school to learn the fundamentals. Practice by creating designs and seeking feedback. Most importantly, build a strong portfolio.
Visual design and graphic design are closely entangled. If you’re interested in becoming a visual designer, consider this Visual Designer Learning Path for comprehensive courses and resources.
How to make a graphic design portfolio?
Creating a graphic design portfolio involves selecting your best work, showcasing a variety of skills, and presenting them professionally. Include high-quality images of your work, a brief description of each piece, and the process involved. Make sure to include visuals in your portfolio, as explained by Michal Malewicz, Co-founder of HYPE4.com, in this video about the importance of visuals in your UX portfolio.
If you want the recruiters to pay attention to what you’re doing to your work, you need them to be interested. And to get them interested, you need some *visuals*; that’s the whole thing. And this is all because we really need to sell ourselves. Now, the world is really crowded; there are a lot of designers out there; there’s a lot of competition, and we need to stand out from that competition because otherwise people are simply just going to browse through our portfolio or our resume very quickly and just get over it because they have a lot of those to go through.
This year, I went through over 250 case studies on Twitter with junior designers sharing their case studies and also sharing their problems. And many of them had the problem of having a portfolio with a couple of case studies and those case studies were very thorough because they finished some courses, they finished some classes or some university classes, and they had pretty big case studies; they had pretty much everything – you know – like if you were checking off a list: Personas, check;
Empathy maps, check – like, everything was there. But they all had this problem of almost never getting any replies. And they weren’t really understanding what’s the problem there. Like, it’s really checking all the boxes – there’s a lot of content there; it shows thorough research; it shows data; it shows tables, graphs, charts, everything. So, what is the problem? The problem that we notice is that a typical case study is really, really academic,
which means that it’s pretty much boring – so, that’s like the whole thing. It’s really, really long, and it’s really filled with a lot of content. And those people, those recruiters have *limited time* to assess those case studies. So, they go through a lot of those case studies by just quickly scrolling through. And if there is nothing that catches their eye in there, it’s really, really bad because they have seen probably similar things in the dozens the same day. And that results in the TL;DR effect,
which basically means ‘Too Long; Didn’t Read’, and this is something that really is happening. Even the people who are tasked to evaluate case studies don’t really read all of them. So, you can help your luck by a concept that I call the *UI Sandwich* which basically means – *keep the whole case study*. You don’t really need to remove anything. It can be super long if you want. But *add a very, very pretty visual on the top* like a key visual.
And one tip is to *always rotate it a little bit diagonally*. That’s why probably you’ve seen this on Dribbble quite a lot – that people rotate their screens a little bit. But the thing is that this key visual is very image-heavy. It shows a couple of screens; it shows some additional decorative elements, and this kind of brings the engagement way, way up, and this keeps that person interested in finding out more of what you did in the project. So, that UI kind of primes them to actually read the rest of the case study.
And then once they get to the end of it, you *add another visual*, just not the same one, because some people actually started doing it this way. So, add a different one, and it still has to be a larger visual to have like a nice sandwich of all the TL;DR stuff between the nice-looking visuals. And that has proven to actually work because those people that had problems with their case studies reported seeing that they are now getting responses
– they are now getting interviews.
Graphic design can be challenging, requiring creativity, attention to detail, and technical knowledge. However, like any skill, it becomes easier with practice and proper training. Don Norman explains in his video that designers, including graphic designers, need to understand the business, politics, and socio-technical systems to make meaningful changes.
This broad understanding and the ability to speak the language of business are essential for a successful career in graphic design.
If you’d like to learn more, take this course on Design for a Better World with Don Norman.
What is graphic design in art?
Artistic graphic design encompasses the creation of visual elements using typography, images, and colors to effectively convey a message or provide a solution to a problem. It encompasses various disciplines like layout design, logo design, and branding.
While graphic artists create original artwork, graphic designers use these artworks and other visual elements to create designs that convey a specific message. Learn more about the differences between graphic artists and graphic designers in this article: Graphic Artist vs Graphic Designer: What’s the Difference?
What does a creative designer do?
A creative designer is responsible for creating visuals across various mediums to communicate messages effectively. They conceptualize and design graphics, layouts, and visual effects to engage target audiences. Their work includes creating logos, marketing materials, website designs, and other visual content.
They also collaborate with other team members and clients to ensure the design aligns with the overall goals and brand identity. Read more about the role of a creative designer in this article: What Does a Creative Designer Do?
