What is Graphic Design?

Are you wondering what is graphic design, check this article to know more.

 Graphic design is a job in which professionals create visual content to send messages. By applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, designers use typography and graphics to meet the specific needs of users and focus on the logic of displaying elements in interactive designs to optimize the user experience.

Graphic design visually affects the shaping of the user experience.

Graphic design is an ancient craft, dating back to Egyptian hieroglyphics and cave paintings at least 17,000 years old. It is a term that originated in the printing industry of the 1920s. It still includes a number of activities, including the creation of logos.

Graphic design in this sense concerns aesthetics and marketing. Graphic designers involve the viewer with images, colors, and typography. Graphic designers working in user experience (UX) design need to justify stylistic choices regarding, for example, image and font placement with a people-centric approach.

This means focusing on – and empathizing more with – your specific users, while creating beautiful designs that maximize usability. Aesthetics should serve a purpose in UX design, we don’t make art for art’s sake. So graphic designers should focus on 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 takes into account the full user experience, including users’ visual processing skills.

If an otherwise enjoyable mobile app can’t give users what they need with multiple thumb clicks, the designer(s) won’t be able to link graphic design to user experience. The scope of UX graphic design includes creating beautiful designs that users find highly enjoyable, meaningful, and useful.

“Design is a solution for a problem. Art is a question for a problem.”

Graphic design is emotional design

While working in the digital age means designing with interactive software, graphic design is still about age-old principles. You have to strike the right chord with users at first glance – hence the similarity between graphic design and emotional design.

As a graphic designer, you need to have a good understanding of color theory and the importance of choosing the right color scheme. Color choices must reflect not only the organization (for example, blue adapts to sofas) but also user expectations (e.g., red for warnings; green for notifications).

You need to design carefully for how elements fit the tone (for example, sans serif fonts for emotion or happiness). You also need to design the overall effect and observe how you shape users’ emotions as you guide them, for example from a landing page to a call to action.

Graphic designers are often involved in motion design for smaller screens. They will keep a close eye on how the aesthetics of their works match the expectations of their users. They can improve the usability of their designs in a fluid and seamless experience, anticipating users’ needs and mindsets. With a view to user psychology, it’s important to stay focused on some particularly important graphic design considerations, namely:

Symmetry and Balance (including types of symmetry)

• Flow
• Repetition
• Default
• The golden ratio (i.e. ratios of 1:1.618)
• The rule of thirds (i.e. how users’ eyes recognize a good layout)
• Typography (includes everything from font choice to title weight)
• Public culture (in relation to the use of colors – e.g. red as a warning or, in some Eastern cultures, a sign of good luck – and reading pattern: e.g. from left to right in Western cultures)

In general, their mission – as far as graphic design is concerned in UX and UI design – is to display information in a harmonious way. You need to ensure that beauty and practicality go hand in hand so that your design can discreetly convey the ideals of your organization to your users.

By establishing a believable visual presence, you signal to users that you know what they want to do – not just because you’ve organized aesthetically pleasing elements where your users expect to find them or where they can intuitively help them, but because of the values ​​that your projects display also reflect theirs.

Your visual content will quickly determine the fate of your design, so don’t ignore the slightest trigger that could turn users off.

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