To understand the meaning of design is…
to understand the part form and content play… and to realize that design is also commentary, opinion, a point of view, and social responsibility. To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.Design is both a verb and a noun. It is the beginning as well as the end, the process and product of imagination.
Paul Rand, Graphic Designer,
“Design, Form Chaos”, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993
A graphic designeris a communicator: someone who takes ideas and gives them visual form so that others can understand them.
The designer uses imagery, symbols, type, color and material – whether it´s concrete like printing on a page, or somewhat intangible, like pixels on a computer screen or light in a video – to represent the ideas that must be conveyed and to organize them into a unified message. Graphic designers perform this service on behalf of a company or an organization to help the entity get its message out to its audience and, in so doing evoke a particular response.
Graphic design, as an industry, is a cousin to advertising, both of which were born from the tumultuous period of the Industrial revolution of the late 1700s and early 1800s, when the working class – finding itself with time on its hands and money to spend in the pursuit of comfort – began to look for stuff to buy and things to do.
Graphic design and advertising share one particular goal- to inform the public about goods, services, events, or ideas that someone believes will be important to them; but graphic design parts company with advertising when it comes to ultimate purpose.
Once advertising informs is audience about some product or event, it cajoles the audience into spending money.
Graphic design however, simply seeks to clarify the message and craft into an emotional experience. Granted, graphic design often is used by advertising to sell; but the designing of messages is, at its core, its own endeavor altogether.
This purpose is what differentiates graphic design from other disciplines in visual arts – a purpose defined by by a client and manifested by a designer, rather than a purpose generated from within the designer. True, the fine arts patron historically was often a client to the great painters, but, up until nineteenth century, artistic creation was understood to be intrinsically a service industry. It wasn´t until the 1830s that the mystique of the bohemian painter as “expreser of self” arose and, even more recently – since the mid 1970s – the idea of the graphic designer as “author”.
years since the design industry began to ask business to take it seriously as a profession, the graphic designer has been touted as everything from visual strategist to cultural arbiter – shaping not only the corporate bottom line through clever visual manipulation of the brand-hungry public, but also the larger visual language of the postmodern environment. All these functions are important to graphic design… but, lest we forget the simplicity of the designer´s true nature, let us return to what a graphic designer does.
assimilates verbal concepts and gives them form into a tangible, navigable experience. The quality of the experience is dependent on the designer´s skill and sensibility in creating or selecting forms with which to manifest concepts, or messages. A designer is responsible for intellectual and emotional vitality of the experience he or she visits upon the audience for such message.
The designer´s task is to elevate the experience of the message above the banality of literal transmission and the confusing self-indulgent egoism of mere eye-candy or self-fulfillment – although these might be important to the designer.
Beauty is a function, after all, of any relevant visual message. Just as prose can be dull and straightforward or well edited by and lyrical, so too can a utilitarian object be designed to be more than just simply what it is.
Some time around 1932, Adolf Loos the noted Viennese architect, said:
There is great difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and in the difference there is leeway for culture.
That´s a lot of leeway.
a discipline that integrates an enormous amount of knowledge and skill with intuition, but it´s more than just the various aspects that go into it: understanding the fundamentals of form and composition; applying those fundamentals to evoke emotion and signify higher-order concepts; manipulating color messages; understanding semiotics and the relationship between different kinds of visual signs; controlling the pacing of material and informational hierarchy; integrating type and image for unified, coherent messaging; and planning the fabrication of the work and ensuring its physical quality as an object, whether it´s printed, animated on screen, or built.